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hegemony
Has Trump's Failed Iran War Destroyed the Unipolar World?
Why the current stalemate in the Persian Gulf could very well spell the official beginning of the multipolar world we've heard so much about.
May 12, 2026
The war launched by Israel and the United States on Iran on February 28 has already proven a turning point in world history. So many elements of geopolitics have coalesced in it that we won’t understand its full significance for some time to come. A ceasefire, especially one as chaotic and fragile as this one, is not the end of war, so the new realities may soon be replaced by others. But safe to say that none of the countries of the regions directly impacted by this war so far—from the Levant and the Persian Gulf all the way to South Asia, and of course the United States and Israel—will be able to return to the status quo antebellum. The abrupt withdrawal of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) from OPEC in late April has already destabilized the Saudi-led oil cartel, and with Emiratis doubling down on their alliance with Israel, the future of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) itself is now uncertain. No one can reliably predict whether the glitzy global lifestyles of the Gulf countries, those of the UAE in particular, will survive long-term the shock they have received via Iranian missiles and drones. It is likely that the economic impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the damage to energy infrastructure throughout the Gulf will be felt in far corners of the world for years in unpredictable ways. Already, crisis conditions exist in many countries, especially in the Global South—power and food shortages and higher prices across the board.
Marine traffic may start to flow safely again through the strait at some point, but on whose terms will that be? Certainly not those of the United States, whose leaders are only starting to realize that they cannot conclude the hostilities as and when they see fit. Iran has used the hiatus in active fighting to begin to develop, in consultation with Russia, China, and Oman, a new framework for governance over the strait. No one should doubt that China and Russia have sided with Iran in the war, though each did so “without showing its hand,” to put it in war-gaming language. Aside from openly condemning what it called unprovoked aggression, Russia maintained a balanced posture. China has kept an even lower profile, leading to many supporters of Iran asking why it was not coming to the latter’s aid as it was battered by two of the most powerful militaries. But a few days into the war, The New York Times reported on concrete US intelligence that Russia was providing Iran with actionable information on US targets across the Gulf. In early May, the Times reported that the Caspian Sea has become a route for Russian supplies for Iran’s drone production.
And China’s involvement, however concealed, could be sensed even before the war in the fact that in January Iran moved from the US-owned GPS to the more advanced Chinese BeiDou satellite constellation. It has also been reported by The Financial Times that in late 2024, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) took possession of a high-resolution Earth-observation satellite from a Chinese company, delivered to it mid-orbit and hence fully functional. This report was denied by the Chinese government. But if true, it would mean that the US is facing in war for the first time ever an adversary that has access to satellite imagery as precise as its own. So, it is likely that China has aided Iran in the same way it helped Pakistan in May last year in its conflict with India, assistance that was confirmed at the time by the latter’s military: quietly sharing its space-, cyber- and electromagnetic-spectrum capabilities. It cannot be denied that Iran has deployed its missiles and drones with unexpected accuracy.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the damage to energy infrastructure throughout the Gulf will be felt in far corners of the world for years in unpredictable ways.
The confrontations in South Asia and the Gulf over the last year are in fact linked in one other way: its performance in the war with its much larger neighbor and traditional adversary raised Pakistan’s geopolitical stature in the region to the point that it could present itself as a mediator in the Iran war when the need arose for one, a surprising turnaround for what has often been considered in the West something akin to a rogue nation. But the Pakistani military establishment has long experience of ingratiating US administrations without surrendering its own interests, and in Trump, his family, and allies seems to have met an equal partner in corruption. China and Russia did finally “show their hand” on April 7 but on a diplomatic battleground in Manhattan, far from the kinetic battlespace of the Gulf. They both vetoed Bahrain’s Security Council resolution, which called for Iran to unilaterally relinquish its control over the Strait of Hormuz but made no mention of the launching of the war against it during ongoing nuclear negotiations. Obviously, just one country’s veto would have sufficed. A point had been made.
A movement of the geopolitical tectonic plates is perceptible in these developments, and it doesn’t appear to be favorable to the powers that launched this war. Whatever the agreements, if any, that materialize from the Islamabad process, Iran has demonstrated its capacity for closing and opening the strait at will and may emerge from the war as a major regional power which can control 20 percent of the world’s oil and LNG production and other vital supply chains. If this happens, Israel’s war on Iran, intended to give it the ability to act at will throughout the region, will have resulted in failure. Given his own domestic political and legal vulnerabilities as an election approaches, can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu afford to let that happen? And can US President Donald Trump prevent Netanyahu from scuttling any agreement he might be willing to sign with the Iranians to evade his own political reckoning in the fall mid-terms? The peace of the world depends on how these questions are answered. Israel itself appears very unimpressive relative to Iran at this moment, busy killing civilians and bulldozing villages north of its border in Lebanon while Iran strengthens its geopolitical position.
By successfully backing Pakistan without showing its hand last May, China had already staked a claim to being a preeminent power in South Asia. And repeating that strategy now with Iran, it has made a bid for a similar position in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Observers have argued for some time, and we have all vaguely sensed, that we now live in a multipolar world, not the unipolar one of the Post-Cold War years, with the US as singular global hegemon. But when exactly did this passage take place? Some date the end of US unipolarity to Xi Jinping’s speech to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in 2017; others, to the beginning of China’s Road and Belt Initiative in 2013, which now includes more than 140 countries worldwide. Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be the more convincing one, the “rise” of China and its alliance with Russia are obviously at the core of this ongoing geopolitical transition.
Soon after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” last year, which tore up the global trade regime, China had already calmly forced a retreat, decisively weaponizing its unassailable position in global supply chains. But some in Washington still act as if geopolitics today are the way they were described by Zbigniew Brzezinsky in 1997, in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, a semiofficial encomium to the unipolar world that was then emerging: he seemed to envision a geopolitical game of chess with effectively one player moving all the pieces. Brzezinski believed (or hoped) that no US administration would be careless enough to allow the formation of an alliance between Russia, China, and Iran to challenge American power in Eurasia, which he considered central to its newfound global “supremacy.” Much the same point had been made in January 1993, by outgoing Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, in his parting memorandum to his incoming successor, Warren Christopher. That dreaded alliance of the future identified by Eagleburger and Brzezinski is now a reality.
During this war, Iran has suffered enormous physical damage, from which it will take decades to recover, even under the best of postwar conditions. And for the regime in Tehran, even if it looks at mere survival, not unreasonably, as a triumph, this might eventually turn out to be a pyrrhic victory, as the basic problem of legitimacy that it faces with respect to portions of its own citizenry still remains, although it has been temporarily suspended during the war. Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that, quietly backed by Russia and China, Iran has succeeded for now in bringing its powerful foreign foes to a stalemate, a standoff that formally announces the end of the unipolar world. Calls from some “America-firsters” for the US to shrink its global footprint and focus on its own hemisphere are in line with the larger geopolitical changes it is now living through.
During the so-called ceasefire, senior officials from across Europe and the Middle East have been making their way to Moscow and Beijing. We should expect an increase of interest across the Global South in BRICS and the linked Shanghai Security Organization (SCO)—Iran is a full member of both—and their vision of an alternative multipolar world order, which calls for strengthening multilateral institutions, above all the United Nations, while the US acts more and more unilaterally, even when this clearly undermines its own interests. It may turn out that Trump is the last American president to proceed under the presumption of a unipolar world, a vision that has now had a brutal collision with multipolar reality.
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The Global South's View of the Harris-Trump Race
Imperialism and hegemony still rule in the United States. But while Kamala Harris and the Democrats may have their flaws, the alternative of four years of Donald Trump is much worse.
Sep 15, 2024
As the U.S. elections come closer, there is growing pressure on many progressives in the Global South to make our voices heard in support of the candidacy of Kamala Harris. No act on your part is insignificant in these elections, we are told. The votes of your relatives in the United States could spell the difference in a very tight race.
The argument is fairly straightforward. Donald Trump is a threat to democracy in the United States and to the interests of the Global South as well. Harris and the Democrats may have their flaws, but the alternative, four years of Donald Trump, is worse.
Past Democratic administrations, the argument continues, may have failed to bring about a more equal society, rein in Wall Street and Big Tech, and make more progress in promoting the rights of minorities. But under the Democrats, there is at least the space to debate these failures and correct them, racism will not be given a free pass, the climate crisis will be given the urgent attention it requires, and fundamental democratic norms like majority rule in electoral contests will not be brazenly violated. Trump in power is very likely to push hard to bring the United States to the brink of authoritarian rule, if not fascism, and informally his administration’s ruling ideology will be unbridled White supremacy.
I have no quarrel with this assessment that a Harris victory would be in the interest of the majority of people in the United States. It is the claim that a Harris presidency would be better for the Global South than a Trump regime that I find questionable and worth an extended discussion.
Two Parties of Empire
Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have favored an expansive imperialism that has extended US corporate hegemony by force of arms. Both have mobilized the ideology of missionary democracy, or spreading the gospel of western democracy in what they consider the benighted non-Western world, to legitimize imperial expansion. And at certain historical moments, like during the debate to invade Afghanistan in 2001, both have manipulated democratic hysteria to advance the ends of empire.
The record speaks for itself. To take just the most recent examples, only one Democratic member of Congress, Barbara Lee, voted against the resolution authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the absence of evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons, the majority of Democratic senators voted to commit U.S. troops to the invasion of Iraq in 2002. And it was a Democratic president, Barack Obama, that led the campaign that, in brazen violation of the principle of national sovereignty, overthrew the Qaddafi government in Libya in 2011, leading eventually to the state of anarchy that has prevailed since then in that country.
Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have favored an expansive imperialism that has extended US corporate hegemony by force of arms.
Of course, there have been some variations in the ways Democrats and Republicans have conducted their empire-building or empire-maintaining activities. Democrats have tended to be more “multilateral” in their approach. They have, in other words, invested more effort in marshalling the United Nations and NATO behind Washington’s imperial adventures than have the Republicans. They have also pushed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to take the lead in economically disciplining countries of the global South. But the aim is simply to provide the U.S. moves with more legitimacy than would a unilateral exercise of U.S. power, that is, to clothe the iron fist with a velvet glove. These are differences of style that are minor and marginal in terms of their consequences.
Critics from the Global South have rightly pointed out that Obama’s elimination of Qaddafi with the approval of the UN Security Council may have had more “legitimacy” than Bush’s overthrowing of Saddam Hussein via his much denigrated “coalition of the willing,” but the results have been the same: the overthrow via the exercise largely of U.S. power of a legitimate government and the consequent disintegration of a society.
The Great Republican Exodus
Over the last few months, however, there has been an interesting phenomenon. More and more people who played key foreign policy roles in previous Republican administrations have declared their support for the Democratic candidate, first Joe Biden, now Kamala Harris. The most notable recent addition to the Democratic bandwagon is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was one of the key architects of Bush Jr’s interventionist wars in the Middle East, who recently signed up to support Harris along with daughter Liz. More are expected to defect in the less than two months remaining before the elections.
There are two reasons why former foreign policy hardliners have been leaving the Republican fold. The first is that they can no longer trust Trump, who now has total control of the Republican base. In their view, Trump during his first term weakened the Western alliance that Washington created over the last 78 years by speaking badly of allies and demanding they pay for U.S. protection, declaring the Republican-sponsored invasion of Iraq a mistake, and crossing red lines that the U.S. Cold War elite put in place, the most famous being his stepping across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea to talk to Kim Jong Un. More recently, he has repeatedly suggested disapproval of U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, while his running mate JD Vance, wants to eliminate aid to Kyiv altogether.
Trump, these Republican deserters feel, is not interested in sticking to the cornerstone of the bipartisan consensus that the U.S. elite, despite their sometimes rancorous quarrels, have adhered to: expanding and maintaining a “liberal” empire via free trade and the free flow of capital—an order promoted under the political canopy of multilateralism, legitimized via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy, and defended by a Western military alliance at the center of which is American power. They worry that Trump is playing to the not insignificant part of his base, pesonified by Vance, that is tired of bearing the costs of empire and see this as one of the key causes of America’s economic decline. They know that what makes “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) attractive to many people is its promise to build a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world and focused on rebuilding the imperial heartland. They are apprehensive that under Trump, the multilateral institutions through which the United States has exercised its power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be allowed to wither away. They fear that selective, pragmatic deal-making, like the one Trump tried with Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin, would, instead, become the norm in U.S. diplomacy and unilateral military action rather than allied initiatives via NATO would be the principal means to coerce and discipline the Global South.
The other reason hardline Republicans are engaging in the once-despised practice of crossing party lines is that the Biden administration is now carrying out the kind of aggressive militarized foreign policy once associated with the Bush Jr administration in the Middle East in the 2000s. Biden has given full-throated support to Israel, which the hardline Republicans have sanctified as the only reliable ally in the Middle East, followed Bush Jr’s policy of isolating Russia by supporting Ukraine, reinvigorated NATO after Trump’s morale-sapping bad-mouthing of U.S. allies and expanded the alliance’s reach to the Pacific, and mounted the full-blown containment of China that Bush Jr and Cheney wanted to carry out but had to shelve owing to their need to win Beijing’s participation in their administration’s “war on terror.”
Biden has, in fact, taken the containment of Beijing beyond Trump’s approach of curtailing trade and technology transfers by carrying out the aggressive military encirclement of China. He has done what no other American president had done since the historic 1979 Joint Communique articulating Washington’s “One China Policy,” which is to explicitly commit Washington to a military defense of Taiwan. He has ordered the U.S. Navy to send ships through the 110-mile-wide Taiwan Strait to bait Beijing and deployed five of the 11 U.S. carrier task forces to the Western Pacific. Not surprisingly, his gestures have given the green light to worrisome bellicose rhetoric from the top military brass, like the statement of General Mike Minihan, chief of the U.S. Air Mobility Command, that, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
That the Democratic party elite now has a monopoly of promoting expansive imperialism was in full display during Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech during the Democratic National Convention on August 23, when she accused Trump of abdicating American gobal leadership, seeking to abandon NATO, and encouraging “Putin to invade our allies” and “do whatever the hell they want.” Republican defectors like Cheney and daughter Liz could only cheer when Harris promised to make sure the U.S. armed forces would be “the most lethal fighting force in the world” and committed herself to making sure “that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.”
Two Paradigms of Empire…
In sum, what we have in contention on November 5 are two paradigms of empire. One is the old Democratic/Republican expansionist vision of empire that seeks to make the world safe for American capital and American hegemony. The opposing view, that of Trump and JD Vance, his vice presidential pick, considers the empire overextended and proposes an “aggressive defensive” posture appropriate to a superpower in decline. The MAGA approach would disengage from what Trump has called “shithole countries”—meaning most of us in the Global South—and focus more on walling off the core of the empire, North America, from the outside world by radically restricting migration and trade, bringing prodigal American capital back, dispensing with what Trump considers the hypocritical exercise of extending foreign aid and exporting democracy, and abandoning with a vengeance all efforts to address the accelerating global climate crisis (preoccupation with which he considers a fetish of effete liberalism).
As far as the exercise of force is concerned, the MAGA approach would most likely be in the Israeli style of periodic unilateral strikes against selected enemies outside the wall to keep them off balance, without consulting any allies or giving a damn for whatever havoc they cause.
If these are what are on offer in the November 5 elections, then it would be foolish for us in the Global South to take sides since both paradigms are detrimental to our interests.
From Helpless Hostages to Decisive Actors
Still, some say, you have to cut the Democrats some slack. In terms of their composition, Democrats and the Republicans are not, strictly speaking, twin sides of the same imperial coin. Owing to the constraints of the U.S. electoral system, there is a large contingent of progressives whose only political home is the Democratic Party. In terms of values, these folks are our allies. They have more in common with us than with their party’s elite, and they have been, for the most part, ignored and taken for granted by the latter, whose attitude towards them can be summed up as: “You have no choice but to support us.”
This view has merit. But the problem is that, so far, most of these progressive Democratic supporters have passively accepted Harris’ and the party elite’s imperial rhetoric and gestures, like Harris’ refusal to grant the rather modest request of giving a pro-Palestinian Democrat a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention
My sense is that the progressive bloc in the Democratic Party probably underestimates its strength. In the circumstances surrounding these elections in particular, they can transform themselves from helpless hostages to awful policies to significant actors that can force Harris and the party elite to think twice or thrice about embracing the rabidly imperialist platform that Harris enunciated at the convention—but only if they’re bold enough to act on their convictions, like Rep. Barbara Lee did in casting the sole dissenting vote against the war in Afghanistan, an act of great courage that history has vindicated.
Progressive Democrats should realize that the only way to get the party elite to listen and change tack is to organize themselves and like-minded voters to abstain from voting if Harris does not retreat from her imperial platform—which, in a tight race, could effectively throw the elections to Trump. If I understand it correctly, this was the approach that the Uncommitted Movement from Michigan originally planned to follow to force Biden to reverse his pro-genocide policy in Gaza. This strategy is risky, but it can work if the party elite gets the message that the progressives are determined to carry out their threat. Fortune has never rewarded the timid. This is the only way to get the party elite to begin to change course. Otherwise they will act like they’ve always acted, from Clinton to Obama to Biden, which is to take your support for granted and run over you.
Democratic Party progressives have less than two months to go until election day to organize and prove that a Harris presidency would represent less of a threat to the interests of the Global South than a Trump-Vance regime. Unless we get clear proof that Harris has backtracked from her rabid and bellicose imperial posture, we in the Global South would be well advised not to take sides in this dogfight between rival parties of empire.
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The NATO Declaration and the Deadly Strategy of Neoconservatism
For the sake of America's security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favor of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence.
Jul 13, 2024
In 1992, U.S. foreign-policy exceptionalism went into overdrive. The U.S. has always viewed itself as an exceptional nation destined for leadership, and the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991 convinced a group of committed ideologues—who came to be known as neoconservatives—that the U.S. should now rule the world as the unchallenged sole superpower. Despite countless foreign policy disasters at neocon hands, the 2024 NATO Declaration continues to push the neocon agenda, driving the world closer to nuclear war.
The neoconservatives were originally led by Richard Cheney, the Defense Secretary in 1992. Every President since then—Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—has pursued the neocon agenda of U.S. hegemony, leading theU.S. into perpetual wars of choice, including Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, as well as relentless eastward expansion of NATO, despite a clear U.S. and German promise in 1990 to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
The core neocon idea is that the U.S. should have military, financial, economic, and political dominance over any potential rival in any part of the world. It is targeted especially at rival powers such as China and Russia, and therefore brings the U.S. into direct confrontation with them. The American hubris is stunning: most of the world does not want to be led by the U.S., much less led by a U.S. state clearly driven by militarism, elitism and greed.
The neocon plan for U.S. military dominance was spelled out in the Project for a New American Century. The plan includes relentless NATO expansion eastward, and the transformation of NATO from a defensive alliance against a now-defunct Soviet Union to an offensive alliance used to promote U.S. hegemony. The U.S. arms industry is the major financial and political backer of the neocons. The arms industry spearheaded the lobbying for NATO's eastward enlargement starting in the 1990s. Joe Biden has been a staunch neocon from the start, first as Senator, then as Vice President, and now as President.
To achieve hegemony, the neocon plans rely on CIA regime-change operations; U.S.-led wars of choice; U.S. overseas military bases (now numbering around 750 overseas bases in at least 80 countries); the militarization of advanced technologies (biowarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, etc.); and relentless use of information warfare.
The quest for U.S. hegemony has pushed the world to open warfare in Ukraine between the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Russia and the United States. The war in Ukraine was provoked by the relentless determination of the U.S. to expand NATO to Ukraine despite Russia’s fervent opposition, as well as the U.S. participation in the violent Maidan coup (February 2014) that overthrew a neutral government, and the U.S. undermining of the Minsk II agreement that called for autonomy for the ethnically Russian regions of eastern Ukraine.
The NATO Declaration calls NATO a defensive alliance, but the facts say otherwise. NATO repeatedly engages in offensive operations, including regime-change operations. NATO led the bombing of Serbia in order to break that nation in two parts, with NATO placing a major military base in the breakaway region of Kosovo. NATO has played a major role in many U.S. wars of choice. NATO bombing of Libya was used to overthrow the government of Moammar Qaddafi.
The U.S. quest for hegemony, which was arrogant and unwise in 1992, is absolutely delusional today, since the U.S. clearly faces formidable rivals that are able to compete with the U.S. on the battlefield, in nuclear arms deployments, and in the production and deployment of advanced technologies. China’s GDP is now around 30% larger than the U.S. when measured at international prices, and China is the world’s low-cost producer and supplier of many critical green technologies, including EVs, 5G, photovoltaics, wind power, modular nuclear power, and others. China’s productivity is now so great that the U.S. complains of China’s “over-capacity.”
Sadly, and alarmingly, the NATO declaration repeats the neoconservative delusions.
The Declaration falsely declares that “Russia bears sole responsibility for its war of aggression against Ukraine,” despite the U.S. provocations that led to the outbreak of the war in 2014.
The NATO Declaration reaffirms Article 10 of the NATO Washington Treaty, according to which NATO’s eastward expansion is none of Russia’s business. Yet the U.S. would never accept Russia or China establishing a military base on the US border (say in Mexico), as the U.S. first declared in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and has reaffirmed ever since.
The NATO Declaration reaffirms NATO’s commitment to biodefense technologies, despite growing evidence that U.S. biodefense spending by NIH financed the laboratory creation of the virus that may have caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
The NATO Declaration proclaims NATO’s intention to continue to deploy anti-ballistic Aegis missiles (as it has already done in Poland, Romania, and Turkey), despite the fact that the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania has profoundly destabilized the nuclear arms control architecture.
The NATO Declaration expresses no interest whatsoever in a negotiated peace for Ukraine.
The NATO Declaration doubles-down on Ukraine’s “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.” Yet Russia will never accept Ukraine’s NATO membership, so the “irreversible” commitment is an irreversible commitment to war.
The Washington Post reports that in the lead-up to the NATO summit, Biden had serious qualms about pledging an “irreversible path” to Ukraine’s NATO membership, yet Biden’s advisors brushed aside these concerns.
The neoconservatives have created countless disasters for the U.S. and the world, including several failed wars, a massive buildup of U.S. public debt driven by trillions of dollars of wasteful war-driven military outlays, and the increasingly dangerous confrontation of the U.S. with China, Russia, Iran, and others. The neocons have brought the Doomsday Clock to just 90 seconds to midnight (nuclear war), compared with 17 minutes in 1992.
For the sake of America's security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favor of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence.
Alas, NATO has just done the opposite.
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US Hegemony From Haiti to Honduras
Missing from corporate news coverage of the crises facing both nations is the role of US intervention that brought them to this point.
Mar 20, 2024
Haiti and Honduras have made headlines in the last few weeks. Honduras’ former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, was just convicted in a US court of drug trafficking. He faces life in prison. Haiti is a nation without a government, as armed groups have united against the US-backed, unelected Prime Minister installed after the assassination of their president in 2021. In both cases, what is missing from mainstream news coverage is the role of US intervention that brought them to this point.
“The crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism,” University of British Columbia Professor Jemima Pierre, a Haitian American scholar, explained on the Democracy Now! news hour. In her NACLA Report article headlined, Haiti as Empire’s Laboratory, she describes her home country as “the site of the longest and most brutal neocolonial experiment in the modern world.”
Haiti was the world’s first Black republic, founded in 1804 following a slave revolt. France demanded Haiti pay reparations, for the loss of slave labor when Haiti’s enslaved people freed themselves. For more than a century, Haiti’s debt payments to France, then later to the US, hobbled its economy. The United States refused to recognize Haiti for decades, until 1862, fearful that the example of a slave uprising would inspire the same in the US.
In 1915, the US invaded Haiti, occupying it until 1934. The U.S. also backed the brutal Duvalier dictatorships from 1957 to 1986. Jean-Bertand Aristide became Haiti’s first democratically-elected president in 1991, only to be ousted in a violent coup eight months later. The coup was supported by President George H.W. Bush and later by President Bill Clinton. Public pressure forced Clinton to allow Aristide’s return in 1994, to finish his presidential term in 1996. Aristide was reelected in 2001.
“In 2004…the U.S., France and Canada got together and backed a coup d’état against the country’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,” Jemima Pierre continued. “The U.S. Marines…put him on a plane with his security officials, his wife and aide, and flew them to the Central African Republic.”Democracy Now! traveled to C.A.R. in 2004 covering a delegation led by Transafrica founder Randall Robinson and U.S. Congressmember Maxine Waters who defied US policy and escorted the Aristides back to the Western Hemisphere. Aristide confirmed to Democracy Now! then that he had been ousted in a coup d’état backed by the United States. Aristide then went to live in exile in South Africa for the next seven years.
In response to allegations that gangs are currently controlling Haiti, Professor Pierre said, “The so-called gang violence is actually not the main problem in Haiti. The main problem in Haiti is the constant interference of the international community, and the international community here is, very explicitly, the U.S., France and Canada.”
The Biden administration is reportedly now considering the transfer of Haitian asylum seekers to the controversial U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – a repeat of some of the worst U.S. policies in its long history of exploitation of Haitians.
Honduras, meanwhile, currently has a democratically-elected president, Xiomara Castro. Her husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, was elected president in 2006, then ousted in a US-backed coup in 2009. In the following years, Honduras descended into a narco-state, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee violence, seeking asylum in the United States and elsewhere.
In 2013, Juan Orlando Hernández was elected president amidst allegations of campaign finance violations, then again in 2017 in an election widely considered fraudulent. Shortly thereafter, his brother Juan Antonio Hernández was arrested in Miami for drug trafficking. Then, following Xiomara Castro’s election, Juan Orlando Hernández himself was arrested and extradited to the US for cocaine trafficking. On March 8th, he was convicted in US federal court, and is currently awaiting sentencing.
“The evidence was chilling,” history professor Dana Frank, who was in the courtroom, said on Democracy Now! “This litany of assassinations of prosecutors, assassinations of journalists, corruption of the police, the military, politicians, the president, his brother, you name it. And it was like the curtain was drawn back, and you could see the day-to-day workings of this tremendous violent, corrupt mechanism that was the Juan Orlando Hernández administration…this was what happened after the 2009 coup that opened the door for the destruction of the rule of law in Honduras.”
US intervention in Haiti, Honduras and other countries is one of the principal drivers of people seeking asylum in the United States, as they flee violence, poverty and persecution at home. This point is almost never mentioned in the US press. To understand and ultimately solve the “immigration crisis,” Americans need to understand what their government has long done in their name, with their tax dollars–arming and propping up brutal regimes abroad.
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What Can Social Movements Learn From Gramsci in Today’s Uncertain Times?
Gramsci encourages movements to pursue wide-ranging interventions, but always to unite them as part of a common program to transform society.
Aug 06, 2023
He has been called one of the most original political thinkers of the 20th century. Historians point out that “If academic citations and internet references are any guide, he is more influential than Machiavelli.” And his impact on the way we think about the processes of social change has been described as “little short of electrifying.”
The accomplishments of Antonio Gramsci, born in Italy in 1891, are all the more remarkable considering that his life was both short and notably difficult: His family was destitute in his childhood; he was sick for much of his life; he spent the prime of his adulthood confined to prison by Benito Mussolini’s fascists after his own party’s attempts to foment revolution had failed; he was often denied access to books during his incarceration; and he died at the age of just 46. Yet, in spite of this, he produced a body of theory that has been widely admired and cited as an inspiration by organizers across several generations and multiple continents.
Amid all this acclaim, it is still fair to ask whether engaging with the Italian’s thinking remains worthwhile for activists more than eight decades after his death. Has interest in Gramsci become merely academic, or are there practical lessons that social movements can fruitfully draw today?
For organizers working in the socialist lineage, Gramsci is important because he offers a version of Marxist analysis that sheds much of the dogmatism and backward-looking orthodoxy that has unfortunately clung to the tradition.
There’s a good argument that the latter is the case. For organizers working in the socialist lineage, Gramsci is important because he offers a version of Marxist analysis that sheds much of the dogmatism and backward-looking orthodoxy that has unfortunately clung to the tradition. At the same time, he retains core insights into why capitalism is inherently exploitative and why changing it will require movements from below to engage in a contest of power, rather than buying into the idea that the system can be successfully tinkered with by technocratic reformers with clever policy ideas.
But even for those who do not personally identify with the socialist tradition, understanding the thinking of Gramsci and his intellectual heirs allows for an appreciation of how movements internationally have developed their strategies: from landless workers in Brazil who have combined land occupations with the creation of a vibrant network of rural schools to left populists in Spain pursuing electoral strategies aimed at creating a new “common sense” in favor of redistribution and social solidarity. In the United States, awareness of Gramsci would be necessary to understand why left educators in New York might run a workshop on “conjunctural analysis,” or why a book like Jonathan Matthew Smucker’s organizing guide takes the title Hegemony How-To.
So what concepts, then, have movements taken from Gramsci’s body of theory? And how has it affected their approaches to organizing?
History Won’t Do Our Work for Us
From Gramsci’s political thinking and practical strategizing come a set of ideas that arguably have only grown more salient with time. Among them: That revolutionary change will not inevitably come thanks to the preordained laws of history. That if progressive movements are to create change, they must win over large swaths of the public to their way of thinking about the world. And that organizing must take place on multiple fronts—cultural, political, economic—requiring engagement with many different institutions of society.
Although he died in 1937, Gramsci did not become well known outside of Italy, particularly in the English-speaking world, until the 1970s. That was when edited translations of his famous Prison Notebooks, written during his incarceration and surreptitiously smuggled beyond fascist reach, finally became widely available. At his trial in 1928, Gramsci’s prosecutor had famously declared, “We must stop this brain working for 20 years!” The expansive Prison Notebooks show why the Mussolini regime saw the theorist as such a threat.
Although writing in fragmentary snippets, Gramsci dives deep into a vast array of topics—spanning religion, economics, history, geography, culture, and education. This range, the historian Perry Anderson has argued, “had, and has, no equal in the theoretical literature of the left.” Beyond questions of political strategy, Gramsci’s work has a major impact on the academic fields of cultural studies, subaltern history, and the study of “world systems” under capitalism.
He believed that only through determined organizing and the strategic application of human will would the fundamental structures of society change for the better.
Owing to Gramsci’s wide range of interests, there are many different lessons that can be drawn from his work. But a first important lesson for organizers is one that emerged from the theorist’s rejection of elements of his own intellectual tradition.
A leader in the Communist Party of Italy, Gramsci witnessed a bold series of factory occupations in the Fiat auto plants in Turin in 1919 and 1920. These actions seemed like they might be a sign of a worker’s revolution that could follow on the heels of the historic Bolshevik victory in Russia. But then, after witnessing the rise of fascism and being jailed in 1926, he was forced to revise his vision of how a more just world might take shape. As the Jamaican-born British scholar Stuart Hall would later explain, Gramsci “worked, broadly, within the Marxist paradigm. However, he… extensively revised, renovated, and sophisticated many aspects of that theoretical framework to make it more relevant to contemporary social relations.” One of the key aspects he jettisoned was the tradition’s sense of historical inevitability.
In Gramsci’s time, it was common for “scientific socialists” to expound a highly deterministic vision of history. According to this view, Karl Marx had uncovered trends in economic development that were akin to natural laws: Capitalism was condemned by its own internal contradictions to produce crises, and these crises would inevitably lead to the victorious rise of the proletariat over its bourgeois exploiters.
Gramsci saw how these beliefs, propagated by elders and contemporaries alike, could lead to fatalism, passivity, and extremist posturing. Those who thought that political problems would be solved by the inexorable march of history did not need to take responsibility for coming up with thoughtful plans that balanced visionary goals with pragmatic action. Instead they could, in Gramsci’s words, hold an “aversion on principle to compromise” and spread the belief that “the worse it gets, the better it will be.” As he put it, “Since favorable conditions are inevitably going to appear, and since these, in a rather mysterious way,” would propel forward revolution, these socialists saw initiatives aimed at proactively ushering in such change as “not only useless but even harmful.”
One can argue that such historical determinism came from a flawed and reductionistic reading of Marx. Yet there is no doubt that it became widespread among many radicals in different periods, and it was particularly dominant in the time of the Second International, the cross-border federation of labor and socialist parties that met periodically between 1889 and 1916, a period that coincided with Gramsci’s youth.
Gramsci was loyal to the idea that economic forces and class relations were critical in shaping the flow of history. Yet he believed that only through determined organizing and the strategic application of human will would the fundamental structures of society change for the better. Gramsci opposed the idea that “immediate economic crises of themselves produce fundamental historical events.” Rather, he argued, “they can simply create a terrain more favorable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought” and certain types of organizing. The recurrent crises of capitalism do create opportunities, but people must come together to exercise “their will and capability” in order to take advantage of auspicious situations.
The key for Gramsci was to avoid falling victim to either economism—or an over-emphasis on the material causes behind historical developments—or ideologism, which involves an exaggerated view of what can be accomplished merely through good intentions and expressions of voluntary resolve. To strike the right balance between them requires careful observation and historical analysis.
Movements must study the current “relation of forces,” or the social, political, and military balance of power between different groups. They must look at the changes taking place in society and determine which are organic, reflecting deep shifts in the economic structure, and which are merely conjunctural—short-term occurrences that may be “almost accidental” and lack “far-reaching historical significance.” Only through such careful preparation can they determine if “there exist the necessary and sufficient conditions” for transformation in a given society, and whether a given plan of action is workable.
Such ideas would resonate with the thinking of other radicals, such as Detroit-based writer, organizer, and activist mentor Grace Lee Boggs, who counseled social movement strategists to ask “What time is it on the clock of the world?” when considering their plans for action. And the ideas parallel concepts from other organizing traditions, such as the field of civil resistance, which emphasizes the role of both skills and conditions—that is, how historical circumstances and human agency each play a part in determining a movement’s success or failure.
An important implication of Gramsci’s argument is that there would be no single path to socialism that every country would follow. Instead, he argued that because the political landscape varies, it is necessary to look carefully at the terrain—what Gramsci describes as taking “accurate reconnaissance of each individual country.”
This idea has proven particularly inspirational to activists in the Global South who have been moved to create versions of radical theory that engage with the unique histories of their regions. Scholars Nicolas Allen and Hernán Ouviña write that Latin American socialists since Gramsci’s time have enlisted his work “into a larger intellectual project that has sought to adapt Marxist theory to the social reality of a region largely ignored by orthodox Marxism.” The Prison Notebooks encouraged them to “engage directly with a set of regional realities” that local communist parties had previously disregarded in deference “to the Communist International’s (Comintern) interpretation of history, which deemphasized the particularities of individual nation-states.”
Of course, for Gramsci, it was crucial that study of conditions in any given country go hand in hand with practical action. Unless someone is aiming “merely to write a chapter of past history,” they should recognize that all political analyses “cannot and must not be ends in themselves.” Instead, Gramsci wrote, these analyses “acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particular practical activity, or initiative of will. They reveal the points of least resistance, at which the force of will can be most fruitfully applied; they suggest immediate tactical operations” and “they indicate how a campaign of political agitation may best be launched.”
If Gramsci’s perspective was only valuable in rebutting orthodox Marxists, it would not have much lasting value today. But its significance is much greater. Although the exact type of belief in the historical destiny of the working class that was prevalent in Gramsci’s time may not commonly exist now, there are still many people—whether they are mainstream academics, political commentators, liberals, or ultra-radicals—who harbor deterministic beliefs of their own. These people hold that social movements have little ability to influence history, that major uprisings emerge solely due to historical circumstances beyond our control, or that technological innovation is the only significant driver of progress and change.
Gramscian analysis provides helpful tools for rejecting such apathy, whether it arises from despair, cynicism, a focus on techno-fixes, or the fear of genuinely aspiring to power. It encourages movements instead to accept responsibility for organizing, educating, and preparing a base of people that can be ready to act when opportune moments arise. After all, Gramsci argues, historical conditions can only truly be judged as favorable by those who have a “concrete possibility of effectively intervening in them.” In other words, fortune favors the organized.
Winning the Battle of Ideas
Gramsci created a further breakthrough by elaborating on the importance of the cultural, political, and ideological elements that, in the Marxist tradition, make up the “superstructure” of society. In the process, he helped develop a new theory of how movements could successfully instill their vision of a just society in a lasting way.
When analyzing why revolution had succeeded in Russia but failed in other countries, including his own, Gramsci drew on an expanded vision of how dominant groups stayed in control. The capitalist state, he argued, could not merely be seen as a set of government institutions that maintained power through coercion—administered through its courts, police, and military forces. Instead, the power of the state extended much further, seeping through the institutions of civil society, including schools, the media, the churches, and other institutions.
A ruling order could only remain intact through the maintenance of hegemony. The concept most commonly associated with Gramsci, hegemony entails not only the use of force and “legal” discipline, but includes the ways in which ruling ideas are disseminated through society, creating legitimacy and consent for the rule of the dominant group.
Those working in the Gramscian lineage contend that activists who aspire to transform the existing order must aim at nothing short of creating a new “common sense” through which people would understand their place in the world.
With these concepts in mind, Gramsci made a distinction between conditions in Russia and the countries of the West. In Russia, he explained, the formal institutions of state were predominant, while “civil society was primordial and gelatinous.” However, “in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society.” In the latter case, civil society protected ruling groups from being easily overthrown: “When the state trembled,” Gramsci explained, “a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch; behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks: more or less numerous from one state to the next.”
Recognizing these conditions, Gramsci argued that the “war of maneuver,” the kind of seizure of power through direct assault modeled by the Russian Revolution, would be supplanted in advanced capitalist countries by a different type of struggle. In the West, organizing would have to focus on the “war of position”—that is, entering into a long-term battle for hegemony, waged through many spheres of social life.
Crucially, this would mean winning the battle of ideas. The critic Raymond Williams wrote that hegemony is made up of a “central system of practices, meanings, and values saturating the consciousness of a society at a much deeper level than ordinary notions of ideology,” and it is something that needs to be continually “renewed, recreated, and defended.” Those working in the Gramscian lineage contend that activists who aspire to transform the existing order must aim at nothing short of creating a new “common sense” through which people would understand their place in the world.
As Harmony Goldberg, an activist and educator at the Grassroot Policy Project, explains, “Gramsci argued that socialism can neither be won or maintained if it only has a narrow working-class base. Instead, the working class should see itself as the leading force in a broader multi-class alliance (termed a ‘historic bloc’ by Gramsci) which has a united vision for change and which fights in the interests of all its members.” Creating a unified alignment means recognizing that people do not form their beliefs in a mechanistic way based on their economic position in society.
Instead, ideological formation is also affected, as Stuart Hall wrote, by “social divisions and contradictions arising around race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender.” The interests of a social group, Hall noted elsewhere, “are not given but have to be politically and ideologically constructed.”
These ideas have important implications: The political arts of popular messaging and coalition-building should not be left to mainstream liberals, but need also to be the domain of those seeking more transformative change. Movements that want to win cannot be content to circulate slogans that appeal only to self-isolated groups of like-minded activists; they must care about reaching out beyond their existing base and crafting messages that can appeal to a broader set of potential allies.
Building a new common sense requires combating the ideas that keep people complacent. Goldberg notes that the individualistic and divisive ideology of currently dominant groups can be profoundly demobilizing. She writes: “We can come to believe that our interests are aligned with the success of capitalism rather than its destructions (e.g. ‘A rising tide lifts all boats.’); we can believe that there are no alternatives to the system as it is…; we can internalize false senses of superiority or inferiority (e.g. white supremacy which encourages poor white people to comfort themselves with their social privileges); and more.”
If movements are to replace such beliefs with a hegemony of their own, they must convincingly articulate an alternative. But this is only a first step. They must also determine which social groups can be united in support of this alternative and then carefully build the political power of that alignment. The goal, as contemporary Gramscians might say, is to create a big enough “we” not only to win occasional elections, but to change the very way in which people think about themselves and their connections to others. It is to build the collective will for action.
Engaging the institutions
Gramscian thought encourages strategic diversity. Since approaches will be developed based on analysis of a given country’s unique circumstances, movement strategies vary across different geographies. And since the war of position is a long-term effort, fought on many different fronts, a wide range of contributions can assist in the struggle for social and economic justice.
In a recent interview with Gramscian scholar Michael Denning on The Dig, podcast host Daniel Denvir suggested that Gramsci’s thinking was a way for the left to break out of stale debates that see “electoralism,” mutual aid, and workplace organizing as mutually exclusive, rather than as approaches that can complement one another. Denning noted in reply, “On the left, we could all have more compassion for each other following one’s own gifts and abilities, rather than guilting people into doing things that they don’t necessarily have gifts for.” He continued, “I think that Gramsci does lead one to not think that one position is guaranteed to be the central position. People should fight in struggles where they feel they can be most effective and most powerful and where their own talents are.”
How to best wage a war of position is up for debate. In the late 1960s, German student activist Rudi Dutschke argued that the left needed to undertake a “long march through the institutions.” This meant entering into the established social bodies—including schools and universities, political parties, media outlets, healthcare providers, community organizations, unions, and the professions—with the intent to radicalize and transform them. Many have seen such a march as an extension of the Gramscian lineage.
Gramsci tells us that power is everywhere, and that holding office is only valuable as part of a larger movement strategy to rally hearts and minds around a genuinely progressive vision.
The Brazilian landless workers movement (known in Portuguese as the Movement dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) is one group that has embraced this approach. Among the largest social movements in Latin America, the MST has maintained rural occupations that have claimed land for upwards of 350,000 families, while also interacting critically with the government to build an extensive network of schools, community health clinics, and food processing centers.
Scholar Rebecca Tarlau describes these efforts as “contentious co-governance.” Here, activist farmers not only alter the nature of the mainstream institutions they enter; they also use these bodies to expand the legitimacy and organizing capabilities of their movement. “Importantly,” Tarlau contends, “the MST not only embodies this Gramscian strategy, but activists also explicitly draw on Gramscian theory to justify their continual engagement with the Brazilian state.”
Critical to this approach is the idea that movement participants enter institutions not as reformers—a position that may leave them vulnerable to cooptation—but as part of an effort to build the “intellectual and moral leadership” required for a progressive project to gain hegemony. “Organic intellectuals,” comparable to the village teachers or parish priests in the Italy of Gramsci’s time, play a vital role in translating alternative ideas about creating a better society into real-world practice.
Distinct from traditional scholars, these local movement participants spread ideology not through the academic development of theory, but through actually exercising leadership in community affairs and institutions. Tarlau explains that, through their actions, these people in effect are “constantly attempting to garner the consent of civil society to support their political and economic goals” and create a “justification for new forms of social relations.”
Too often, mainstream approaches to politics see all power as residing in the government, especially at the federal level, and they see electing winnable centrists to office as the key to promoting progress. Gramsci tells us that power is everywhere, and that holding office is only valuable as part of a larger movement strategy to rally hearts and minds around a genuinely progressive vision. At the other end of the spectrum, many people working outside of government pursue change in only one area—at the level of a single workplace, school, church, food cooperative, or neighborhood initiative—without connecting their efforts to a more comprehensive project of change. Gramsci encourages movements to pursue wide-ranging interventions, but always to unite them as part of a common program to transform society.
“Especially today,” Stuart Hall wrote in the 1980s, “we live in an era when the old political identities are collapsing.” The same might be said of our present times. If movements for justice are to win, they must work to construct new identities and alliances, built through engagement with the diverse institutions and sites of political conflict that make up peoples’ lives.
Gramsci provides no easy answers for the current challenges that we face. Yet with concepts such as “hegemony” and “organic intellectuals,” the “war of position” and the “historic bloc,” “conjunctural analysis” and the battle for “common sense,” he provides social movements with an enriched strategic vocabulary. And with his insistence on rejecting determinism and engaging with society’s most deeply held beliefs, he offers an approach to radical politics that is dynamic enough to stay relevant through the crises—and transformations—yet to come.
Research assistance provided by Sean Welch.
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The Second Cold War Is More Dangerous Than the First
Americans have to ask themselves: Is it worth risking nuclear war—and an apocalyptic nuclear winter—for no loftier purpose than to maintain their country’s violently enforced grasp of overwhelming global power?
Apr 02, 2023
Twenty years ago, Noam Chomsky published a bestselling book called Hegemony or Survival. Since then, the stark choice he posed has only become more urgent. Depending on how humanity responds to the challenges of ecological destruction and imperialistic war, in the coming decade that terrifying question “Hegemony or survival?” may well be answered.
Modern history shows that the most dangerous periods are when two or more great powers are struggling for hegemony. The eighteenth century in Europe was a time of “multipolarity,” as Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia were almost continually at war, competing for geopolitical advantage and to divide up the continent between them. The conflicts escalated in the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, as a mighty France, bursting with revolutionary energy, strove for absolute dominance against, in the end, Britain and Russia.
The 1815 Congress of Vienna led to a century-long relative balance of power presided over by an industrializing Britain, which soon became the supreme world power. Once industrialization swept the rest of Europe, however, particularly Germany, Britain’s hegemony began to be challenged, not only in the Scramble for Africa but even in Europe itself. German elites wanted their country to be the next Britain, and to a great extent it was their desire for hegemony that caused World War I. As well as World War II, of course.
Since 1945, the United States has been the global hegemon, or something close to a hegemon. As John Ross notes in the recently published Washington’s New Cold War, even at the height of its relative economic achievement in the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union’s GDP was only 44 percent of the U.S.’s. The Soviets had vast power in their limited sphere encompassing Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but they were not a capitalistically expansive, dynamically growing imperial power in the mode of the United States—or, more recently, of a resurgent China. China’s GDP is 74 percent of the U.S.’s, and its growth rate is higher (it has grown seven times faster than the American economy since 2007). Measured by purchasing power parities, the U.S. accounts for only 16 percent of the world economy, and China’s economy is 18 percent larger. In short, for the first time since World War II, we are entering an era of real competition between two mammoth economies, a declining hegemon and an aspiring hegemon.
When people talk about “the China threat,” this is all they mean. In the long run, China poses a greater threat to U.S. power than the Soviet Union ever did. Mainstream commentators and politicians will prate about China’s threat to democratic values and human rights—there always has to be an ideological rationalization for geopolitical strategy—but U.S. foreign and domestic policy since the Second World War tells us how much its elites care about democracy and human rights. From the Vietnam War to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, and from U.S. support for thugs like Batista, Diem, Iran’s Shah, Suharto, Duvalier, Trujillo, Somoza, Pinochet, Marcos, Rios Montt, Mobutu, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak, Sisi, Modi, Mohammed bin Salman, and Netanyahu to CIA coups and attempted coups against countless governments, it is self-evident that policymakers couldn’t care less about the moral values they pretend to espouse.
Americans have to ask themselves: Is it worth risking nuclear war—and an apocalyptic nuclear winter—for no loftier purpose than to maintain their country’s violently enforced grasp of overwhelming global power?
Threats to U.S. Power
The current flashpoint, of course, is the war in Ukraine, which is helping to midwife a “partnership” between China and Russia, both of which are also deepening their ties with Iran.
Decades ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that “a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.” He would presumably not be very happy with U.S. policies that are bringing about exactly this coalition. At the same time, U.S. missteps in the Middle East and its relative disengagement from the region since the Obama presidency are allowing China to improve its position there, as illustrated by the deal it recently brokered between Iran and Saudi Arabia to normalize relations. China’s burgeoning economic interests not only in the Middle East but across most of the world, a function of its colossal, globe-spanning Belt and Road Initiative, necessitate that the country play an ever-greater diplomatic role in fraught regions. Saudi Arabia, for its part, has shown it is happy to defy Washington, even joining much of the world in disregarding Western sanctions on Russia.
While Washington’s failure to convince most countries to economically and diplomatically isolate Russia highlights the U.S.’s declining “hegemony,” the real threats to American power run deeper than diplomatic embarrassments. In the coming years, the very status of the dollar as the world’s dominant currency may be threatened. A kind of “de-dollarization” has been happening for some time now, as, for example, the share of dollar reserves held by central banks declined from 71 percent in 1999 to 59 percent in 2021. But in the last few years, and especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing effort by many countries to undermine the dollar’s dominance of the global financial system has intensified.
In part, this is because of the U.S.’s “weaponization” of the dollar: in the recent past, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Afghanistan, and Russia have all suffered from financial and trade sanctions that have included even freezing overseas assets and removal from the SWIFT messaging system that underpins the world’s financial infrastructure. Other countries, understandably worried about suffering the same fate, share Russia’s interest in developing new financial institutions and networks outside of the U.S.-led system. Apart from this motivation, they simply want to reduce their exposure to the effects of U.S. economic and monetary policy, which can devastate economies. And as China rises, it makes sense for it to promote use of the renminbi, or at least non-dollar currencies.
To that end, the BRICS countries, for instance, have been establishing new institutions and market mechanisms to bypass the dollar, and are even exploring the possibility of creating a new reserve currency based on the BRICS basket of currencies. Institutions like the New Development Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, new payment infrastructures that are alternatives to SWIFT, central bank digital currencies, bilateral trade conducted in currencies other than the dollar, and a renminbi oil futures market to partially de-dollarize the global oil trade all point toward a future currency regime that is at least multilateral, if not bilateral. The famous economist Nouriel Roubini argues that, “in a world that will be increasingly divided into two geopolitical spheres of influence,” a bilateral currency regime is likely to emerge, perhaps in the next decade.
Given that “the dollar’s dominant position in the global financial system [is] the very foundation of [the U.S.’s] global leadership,” as two experts note, Washington can hardly be viewing all these developments with equanimity. Loss of the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency would have severe consequences for the American economy. But this outcome is exactly the end goal of Washington’s bellicose policies toward its perceived rivals! Through economic sanctions and aggressive military actions—expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and encircling China with U.S. bases, military forces, and militarized partner states like Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and even Taiwan—the United States is driving into existence a hostile bloc of great powers and medium-sized powers that are necessarily committed to its defeat. Their policies, then, will become increasingly belligerent, which will serve to justify even more belligerent U.S. policies, in a vicious circle that amounts to an extraordinarily dangerous “hybrid war” and arms race.
History shows that imperial hubris goes before a fall. In this case, though, it won’t be only the empire that falls; it will, in all likelihood, be civilization itself.
Addicted to War
The Pentagon has made a record budget request this year of $842 billion, which it says is necessary to counter China. This claim should inspire skepticism, given that the U.S. has around 750 overseas military bases and China has about eight—one in Djibouti and a few on man-made islands in the South China Sea. China’s military budget, which has been increasing since America’s “Pacific Pivot,” is $225 billion, not a small sum but still a fraction of the Pentagon’s.
It is an interesting thought experiment, incidentally, to imagine how Washington would react if China had scores of military bases off the U.S. coast and had deputized countries in the Americas to act as its armed sentinel states. Most probably, we wouldn’t be around to talk about it, because a world war would already have wiped us out.
In fact, contemporary China is probably the most pacific great power in world history, as Craig Murray observes. As the U.S. has rampaged all over the Middle East and expanded its direct or indirect military presence to virtually every region of the globe, what wars has China started?
What territories has it annexed? What countries has it invaded? The usual response is that sometime in the future it might invade Taiwan—but given the harm such an invasion would likely inflict on the Chinese economy (because of Taiwan’s cutting-edge semiconductor industry, whose physical facilities could well be damaged or destroyed in an invasion), we should be skeptical of this claim too. Even hawkish Chinese generals seem to think war with Taiwan would be “too costly.” In any event, are annual military budgets of almost a trillion dollars necessary to defend Taiwan?
The conclusion is inescapable that the U.S. is simply trying to intimidate an economic rival, a country that, like Putin’s Russia (only more so), challenges its unfettered dominance of the entire world economy. The record of Washington’s foreign policy since 1945 is to seek and enforce compliance in any way it can, whether through carrots or sticks—blandishments and economic or military aid in some cases, coups, invasions, sanctions, paramilitary operations, and militaristic bullying in others. Defiant regimes cannot be tolerated. Accordingly, policymakers want a compliant (or weakened) Russia and a compliant or weakened China. The calculus is evidently that military buildup, whatever crises it leads to and however unpredictable its long-term effects, is the surest means of achieving these ends. It also has the virtue of projecting overwhelming power, which is something powerful states value for its own sake.
Even if the United States doesn’t succeed in provoking military conflicts with China (as it did with Russia), the new Cold War of which Washington is the primary instigator is profoundly damaging to the interests of humanity. As the Washington Post reports, this new Cold War “may see the world divided into opposing camps for decades, stymieing cooperation on climate change, choking global action on human rights abuses, paralyzing international institutions and increasing tensions in contested regions.” If only for the sake of cooperating to tackle global warming, nothing is more imperative than for great powers, first among them the U.S., to adopt conciliatory policies.
But that means Americans have to pressure their government to this end. And that, in turn, means building an anti-imperialist left. From Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (not to mention right-wing legislators), there isn’t a single principled anti-imperialist in Congress. In a time of staggering dangers from war and ecological destruction, this is an astonishing and shameful fact.
For now, it seems that humanity is choosing the path of battling for hegemony rather than surviving.
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Ukraine and The Tunnel at the End of the Light
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more.
Feb 26, 2023
“Light at the end of the tunnel” was an iconic phrase used by the warmongers who kept the U.S. in Vietnam long after the War had been lost. The implication was that insiders could see through the fog of war and know that things were getting better. It was a lie.
In January 1966, long before the military height of the War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson that the U.S. had a one-out-of-three chance of winning on the battlefield. But Johnson, like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, and Nixon after him, didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. So, he ginned up a simplistic lie and “soldiered on.”
The lie was blown by the Tet Offensive in January 1968. More than 100 U.S. military installations were attacked in a simultaneous nationwide assault that stunned the U.S. The broadcaster, Walter Cronkite, then “the most trusted man in America,” bellowed on national television, “I thought we were supposed to be winning this damned thing.” It was the beginning of the end of the U.S.’ murderous and failed occupation.
We’re now facing another light-and-tunnel event, this time in Ukraine. Only now, it’s not the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the tunnel at the end of the light. What do we mean by that?
Until now, it’s been all light. Remember when the scrappy Ukrainian forces were kicking the barbarian Russian hordes’ asses? When every development betrayed the Russians’ clod-footed strategy, its soldiers’ bad morale, its army’s poor provisioning and worse leadership, and the perilous political situation for Putin back home? The testosterone was flowing. The bravado was intoxicating. The exceptionalism was sublimely seductive. It was only a matter of time and pluck and determination before Ukraine would bloody the bully’s nose and show it what the West was made of.
Remember?
No more.
You can prosecute a war for only so long on the strength of smoke and mirrors, delusions and illusions, lies and press releases. Eventually, however, reality catches up with you. The thuggishly propagandized American citizenry couldn’t know it, but that catching up began in the first weeks of the War and has only accelerated since.
Within the first week of the War, Russia had destroyed Ukraine’s air force and air defenses. By the second week, it had taken out most of Ukraine’s armories and weapons depots. Over following weeks and months, it systematically demolished artillery shipped in from former Warsaw Pact, now NATO, countries in Eastern Europe. It dismantled the country’s transportation and fuel supply systems. It has recently taken out most of the country’s electrical infrastructure.
The Ukrainian army has lost an estimated 150,000 troops, a pace more than 140 times the rate of U.S. losses in Vietnam. This, at a time when 10 million of its formerly 36 million people have fled the country. The military is down to dragooning 16-year-old boys and 60-year-old men to man the barricades. It cannot get replacement ammunition. Russia has knocked out some 90% of Ukraine’s drones, leaving it largely sightless. Delivery times for the tanks that are the hoped-for “game changer” are running into months and years. Not that that will matter.
Remember all the other failed “game changers”? The M777 howitzers and the Stryker armored fighting vehicles? The HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and the PATRIOT air defense systems? All were going to turn the tide at one time. All have proven impotent to stop Russia from seizing 20% of Ukraine’s territory and annexing it and its people to Russia.
The U.S. lost the economic war, as well. Remember Joe Biden’s delusional prediction that the U.S. would see that “the ruble will be reduced to rubble”? And that “the most stringent sanctions regime in history” was going to “weaken” Russia, perhaps even leading to Putin’s overthrow? Most of it backfired, badly. Last year, the ruble reached its highest exchange rate in history. Russia’s 2022 trade surplus of $227 billion was up 86% from 2021. The U.S.’ trade deficit over the same period rose 12.2%, and is approaching $1 trillion.
As a result of all of the above and more, the tide of insider opinion has turned against the War. Senior officials in Europe are talking openly about how the losses are unsustainable and they need to get back to security architectures that prevailed before the poisoned CIA-supported coup in Maidan in 2014. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently let slip that “It will be very, very difficult to eject the Russians from all of occupied Ukraine in the next year. The Washington Post warned recently that Ukraine faced a “critical moment” in the war, belaboring the fact that U.S. support was not limitless and would soon be reached. Hint. Hint.
The Rand Corporation, one of the U.S.’ best-connected strategic whisperers, just published a report stating that “The consequences of a long war far outweigh the benefits.” It explicitly states that the U.S. needs to husband its resources for its more important upcoming conflict with China. Newsweek headlined that “Joe Biden Offered Vladimir Putin 20 Percent of Ukraine to End War.” It also revealed that “Nearly 90 percent of the world isn’t following us on Ukraine.” Vast swaths of Latin American, Africa, and Asia refuse to support the U.S. in its demand for sanctions against Russia.
These are not “Light at the end of the tunnel” divinations. Quite the contrary. If there’s a common thread running through it all it is the sickening recognition that the war is lost, militarily, economically, and diplomatically, that there is no plausible scenario in which those losses will be turned around by soldiering on, and that what is needed now is a hide-the-loss, get-out-any-way-you-can, face-saving exit strategy.
That will not be available, either. That’s where the tunnel at the end of the light comes into play.
Even before the U.S. and its NATO puppets undertook the War, the rest of the world—and that means most of the world—was congealing itself into an anti-Western economic and security bloc. Led by China and its strategic ally, Russia, that bloc includes more than a dozen trade and security organizations. Those include the BRICS confederation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, working explicitly to devise multi-polar institutions to stand up to the U.S.’ unipolar hegemonic model.
It includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security compact made up of leading nations from east, central, and south Asia, including China, Russia, India, and soon, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. It is explicitly working to devise measures to prevent the kind of predatory military assaults the U.S. carried out against Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
The organizing economic engine behind these efforts it is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. BRI is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines, to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more. It is critical to understand why BRI poses such daunting challenges to U.S. supremacy in the world.
Infrastructure is so powerful because it spins off a vast, unimaginable array of secondary, and tertiary economic benefits. It was the railroads in the nineteenth century that bound the U.S. together as the world’s first continental-scale market. Manufacturers could produce for a larger market, and, therefore, at larger scale, and, therefore, at lower cost, than could producers anywhere else on earth.
The railroads made the U.S. the largest market in the world for iron, steel, machine tools, grading equipment, farm equipment, and scores of other commercial and industrial products essential to a modern industrial economy. The U.S. began the 1800s with 1.5% of the world’s GDP. It ended the century with 19% of a four-times larger number, making it the largest economy in the world.
Similarly, automobiles. People think it was Henry Ford and mass production that made the Twentieth Century “The American Century.” In fact, it was the build-out of millions of miles of roads and, later, interstates, without which automobiles would have remained expensive playthings of the wealthy. Those roads stitched the country together into an asphalt network that allowed individual mobility, by virtually anybody, anywhere, down to every street address in the country. The world had never seen anything like it.
The secondary and tertiary economic effects were astounding, everything from the world’s largest markets for steel, glass, plastics, and rubber, to gasoline, diesel, highway construction on a continental scale, repair shops and drive-ins, to the entire panoply of culture we know of as suburbia. The Twentieth Century was the Century of the Automobile. The infrastructure the U.S. built to make it possible was the major reason—at least economically—that the U.S. led the world for most of that century.
China is now proposing to do the same for Asia in the Twenty-First Century, but on a much larger scale. It is leading an infrastructure build-out that will dwarf Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system. It will serve most of the five billion people in Eurasia, thirty TIMES more than the 150 million people Eisenhower’s project helped.
Wisely, China has ensured that all of the 100+ nations joining BRI are enriched by their participation, whether building themselves up domestically, or extending their reach internationally. It is the largest, most compelling, geographically extensive, nationally inclusive, mutually enriching economic enterprise in the history of the world. The U.S. is not part of it.
Finally, there is the matter of the dollar. Since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, the global economy has used the dollar as the primary currency of international trade. This has given the U.S. an “exorbitant privilege” in that it can essentially write an unlimited stream of hot checks to the world, because countries need dollars to be able to conduct international commerce. The U.S. “sells” them dollars by issuing Treasury debt, which is a universally fungible international medium of exchange.
One of the consequences of this arrangement is that it has allowed the U.S. to spend far beyond its means, running up $32 trillion of debt since 1980, when its national debt stood at a mere $1 trillion. The U.S. uses this debt to, among other things, fund its gargantuan military with its 800 military bases around the world, which it uses to do things like destroy Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and a host of lesser predations on other countries. All the world sees this and is repulsed by it.
The world sees how dollar hegemony underwrites the U.S.’ ability to carry out or attempt coups in Honduras, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Belarus, Egypt, Syria, and, of course, Ukraine, among others. And these are just those in the past two decades.
The same dollar hegemony underwrote U.S. predations in the latter part of the Twentieth Century against Iran, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries. Again, the rest of the world sees this. U.S. citizens, rapturously oblivious in their hermetically sealed media bubble, do not.
The world saw how the U.S. stole $300 billion of Russian funds that were held in Western banks, part of its sanctions regime against Russia for its role in the Ukraine war. They’ve seen how the U.S. has carried out similar thefts against dollar-denominated funds of Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Iran. It sees how the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates to take care of U.S. needs makes capital flow out of other countries, and how it makes their currencies fall, forcing inflation on them. Not a single country in the world is left untouched.
The cumulative impact of these facts is that many countries would rather not be held hostage to the implicit and explicit negative consequences of dollar hegemony. They also want to remove the “exorbitant privilege” that they believe the U.S. has abused to their individual and collective detriment.
They have begun—again, led by Russia and China—to build an international finance and trading system that doesn’t rely on dollars, that uses countries’ local currencies, gold, oil, or other assets to trade. This received special impetus last year when Saudi Arabia announced it would begin accepting Chinese yuan in exchange for its oil. Oil is the world’s most valued internationally-traded commodity, so the perception is that a dam is beginning to break.
It will take years before an equally functional substitute for the dollar is devised but what began a few years ago as a trickle has gained momentum and urgency as a consequence of U.S. actions in Ukraine. When the dollar is no longer the world’s international reserve currency and nations don’t need dollars to trade with each other, the U.S. will no longer be able to fund its massive budget and trade deficits by writing hot checks. The withdrawal will be agonizing and will greatly circumscribe the U.S.’ role as global hegemon.
U.S. actions in Ukraine have driven together its two greatest adversaries, Russia and China. They, joined by India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and dozens of other countries, are carrying out a Mackinder-feared Eurasian integration that will leave the U.S. outside of the world’s largest and most dynamic trading bloc.
The U.S.’ military failure has advertised, once again (after Iraq and Afghanistan), the relative impotence of U.S. military solutions. Yes, it can still destroy small, defenseless countries like Serbia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But against a peer competitor that has chosen to stand up to it, the U.S. has, frankly, been handed its ass. All the world can see it.
Events have shown the hollowness of U.S.-led economic and financial systems, as well, especially compared to China. China’s economic performance has far surpassed that of the U.S. It has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than any country in the history of the world. Its growth has made it the largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. While average inflation-adjusted incomes in the U.S. are little higher than they were 50 years ago, incomes in China are up more than 10 TIMES over the same period. And it has done this without brutalizing and pillaging other nations that refuse to bend to its hegemonic will.
And, the War has betrayed, as nothing else possibly could, the diplomatic isolation of the U.S., with the vast majority of the world’s people refusing to implement U.S.-demanded sanctions against Russia. Its destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline is recognized as the greatest act of state-sponsored terrorism in history, easily surpassing 911 in terms of the hundreds of millions of people it will hurt. And this, to one of its putative allies, Europe. Imagine what happens to its enemies.
This is the tunnel at the end of the light, a multi-polar as opposed to a unipolar world. It means increasing isolation of the U.S. from the rest of the world, the closing in of options, the narrowing of opportunities, the loss of strategic primacy that once graced the greatest power in the history of the world. It will mean dramatically reduced power and influence vis-à-vis the U.S.’ strategic adversaries, and markedly constrained ability to operate militarily, economically and financially in the world, what with the hot checkbook soon to be taken away.
In twenty or thirty years, the U.S. will still be a substantial regional power, perhaps like Brazil in South America, Iran in West Asia, or Nigeria in Africa. But it will not be the global hegemon it once was, able to project and inflict power in the world as it has done for the last century. The U.S. abused its providential anointment as the exceptional nation. That abuse has been recognized, called out, and is now being acted against by most of the other nations of the world. The future will be very different for the U.S. than it has been for the past 80 years, since the end of World War II when it towered over the rest of the world like a giant among pygmies. Ukraine will prove to have been the turning point in this transformation, the tunnel at the end of the light.
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Africa: Western Colonialism vs The Legacy of the Soviet Union
Moscow - along with Beijing - is preparing for a long-term geopolitical confrontation in Africa.
Aug 07, 2022
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's recent tour in Africa was meant to be a game changer, not only in terms of Russia's relations with the continent, but in the global power struggle involving the US, Europe, China, India, Turkey and others.
Many media reports and analyses placed Lavrov's visit to Egypt, the Republic of Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia within the obvious political context of the Russia-Ukraine war. The British Guardian's Jason Burka summed up Lavrov's visit in these words: "Lavrov is seeking to convince African leaders and, to a much lesser extent, ordinary people that Moscow cannot be blamed either for the conflict or the food crisis."
Though true, there is more at stake.
Africa's importance to the geostrategic tug of war is not a new phenomenon. Western governments, think tanks and media reports have, for long, allocated much attention to Africa due to China's and Russia's successes in altering the foreign policy map of many African countries. For years, the West has been playing catch up, but with limited success.
The Economist discussed 'the new scramble for Africa' in a May 2019 article, which reported on "governments and businesses from all around the world" who are "rushing" to the continent in search of "vast opportunities" awaiting them there. Between 2010 and 2016, 320 foreign embassies were opened in Africa which, according to the magazine, is "probably the biggest embassy-building boom, anywhere, ever."
Though China has often been portrayed as a country seeking economic opportunities only, the nature and evolution of Beijing's relations with Africa prove otherwise. Beijing is reportedly the biggest supplier of arms to sub-Saharan Africa, and its defense technology permeates almost the entire continent. In 2017, China established its first military base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.
Russia's military influence in Africa is also growing exponentially, and Moscow's power is challenging that of France, the US and others in various strategic spaces, mainly in the East Africa regions.
But, unlike the US and other western states, countries like China, Russia and India have been cautious as they attempt to strike the perfect balance between military engagement, economic development and political language.
'Quartz Africa' reported that trade between Africa and China "rose to a record high" in 2021. The jump was massive: 35% between 2020 and 2021, reaching a total of $254 billion.
Now that Covid-19 restrictions have been largely lifted, trade between Africa and China is likely to soar at astronomical levels in the coming years. Keeping in mind the economic slump and potential recession in the West, Beijing's economic expansion is unlikely to slow down, despite the obvious frustration of Washington, London and Brussels. It ought to be said that China is already Africa's largest trade partner, and by far.
Russia-China-Africa's strong ties are paying dividends on the international stage. Nearly half of the abstentions in the vote on United Nations Resolution ES-11/1 on March 2, condemning Russia's military action in Ukraine, came from Africa alone. Eritrea voted against it. This attests to Russia's ability to foster new alliances on the continent. It also demonstrates the influence of China - Russia's main ally in the current geopolitical tussle - as well.
Yet, there is more to Africa's position than mere interest in military hardware and trade expansion. History is most critical.
In the first 'scramble for Africa', Europe sliced up and divided the continent into colonies and areas of influence. The exploitation and brutalization that followed remain one of the most sordid chapters in modern human history.
What the Economist refers to as the 'second scramble for Africa' during the Cold War era was the Soviet Union's attempt to demolish the existing colonial and neo-colonial paradigms established by western countries throughout the centuries.
The collapse of the Soviet Union over three decades ago changed this dynamic, resulting in an inevitable Russian retreat and the return to the uncontested western dominance. That status quo did not last for long, however, as China and, eventually, Russia, India, Turkey, Arab countries and others began challenging western supremacy.
Lavrov and his African counterparts fully understand this context. Though Russia is no longer a Communist state, Lavrov was keen on referencing the Soviet era, thus the unique rapport Moscow has with Africa, in his speeches. For example, ahead of his visit to Congo, Lavrov said in an interview that Russia had "long-standing good relations with Africa since the days of the Soviet Union."
Such language cannot be simply designated as opportunistic or merely compelled by political urgency. It is part of a complex discourse and rooted superstructure, indicating that Moscow - along with Beijing - is preparing for a long-term geopolitical confrontation in Africa.
Considering the West's harrowing colonial past, and Russia's historic association with various liberation movements on the continent, many African states, intelligentsias and ordinary people are eager to break free from the grip of western hegemony.
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The 'Insurrection' and Its Discontents: 'American Exceptionalism' Revisited
The more political chaos and societal division widen, the more the notion of exceptionalism will be exposed as bizarre, selfish, and unsustainable
Jan 23, 2021
History is being written in the United States today. Even the most pessimistic about the prospects of American democracy have rarely ventured out this far while offering a bleak analysis of America's future, whether in terms of political polarization at home or global standing abroad.
As shocking and, certainly, telling as the images of thousands of American protesters taking over the symbols of America's federal, representative democracy in Washington DC on January 6, it was only a facet in a far more complex and devastating political trajectory that has been in the making for years.
While mainstream US media has conveniently attributed all of America's ills to the unruly character of outgoing President Donald Trump, the truth is not quite so convenient. The US has been experiencing an unprecedented political influx at every level of society for years, leading us to believe that the rowdy years of Trump's Presidency were a mere symptom, not the cause, of America's political instability.
Even the storming of the congressional halls by angry pro-Trump crowds did not fundamentally alter the make-up of America's political affiliations. Not only did Democrats remain firmly Democrats, but Republicans also remained entrenched in their republicanism and their allegiance to President Trump.
The House of Representatives' vote on impeaching Trump, held on January 13, hardly registered a significant shift even among establishment Republicans. Only ten Republican members of Congress voted to impeach Trump. But how about ordinary people - have they changed their views on Trump following the congressional insurrection? Hardly.
According to an Economist/YouGov poll published on January 13, 69% of all Republicans surveyed said that activists from the anti-fascist, leftist group, Antifa, are to be blamed for the takeover of the Capitol. While 22% said they are 'unsure', a meager 9% agreed that Trump's supporters instigated the violent events, which, even then, should not automatically be understood to be an admission of guilt.
These results should not come as a surprise. The mistrust in the government and media in the US is so widespread that the country is experiencing two parallel political realities, each committed to a fundamentally different set of aspirations. Each side perceives the other as the enemy, and while still believing in its own version of 'democracy', it no longer agrees to any functional definition of the term.
This has not always been the case.
In their seminal book, "Manufacturing Consent," Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman provided a most comprehensive analysis of how the 'system' - the government/ruling classes, big business, and mainstream media - has invented the most effective mechanism which allowed the US to ensure two naturally contradicting realities: persistent popular consent within a seemingly democratic governance.
"The beauty of the system ... is that ... dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins so that, while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda," Chomsky and Herman argued.
Years later, Chomsky contested that, underneath this facade of democracy, the US is, in actuality, a plutocracy, a country that is dedicated to serving the interests of the powerful few. He also argued that, while the US does operate based on formal democratic structures, these are largely dysfunctional. In an interview with Global Policy Journal in 2019, the famed linguist and historian further asserted that the "US Constitution was framed to thwart the democratic aspirations of most of the public."
While these realizations have served as the core of the US Left's ideology, it was most interesting to see American Right constituencies leading what they call the 'revolution,' referred to by mainstream media as 'insurrection.' Equally interesting, many of Trump's supporters actually come from working-class and lower-middle-class America, itself a fascinating subject in its own right.
Regardless of what may transpire in the official investigation of the Capitol's upheaval, US political polarization, the breakdown of trust between the public and the ruling elites, along with their media allies, will continue unabated. Undoubtedly, the consequences will be dire.
But there is another consequential crisis that is also brewing, 'American exceptionalism,' a rare meeting point between Democrats and Republicans, is facing its greatest challenge since its coinage sometime in the mid-17th century.
Historically, the US has defined and redefined its mission in the world based on lofty spiritual, moral and political maxims, starting with 'Manifest Destiny,' to fighting communism, to eventually serving as the defender of human rights and democracy around the world, using violence whenever necessary. In truth, 'protecting human rights' or 'restoring democracy' were mere pretenses often used to provide a moral cover that allows the US to reorder the world for the sake of expanding its market and ensuring its economic dominance.
The late American historian, Howard Zinn, explained in his essay entitled 'The Power and the Glory,' the functional meaning of American exceptionalism as such: "... that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary ..."
Many examples and numerous violent images can be immediately summoned when Zinn's definition is translated into historical precedents. From the genocide of the Native Americans to the enslaving of millions of Africans, to the never-ending interventions in South America - starting with the Monroe doctrine of 1823 - all the way to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, American exceptionalism has always served the purpose of reinforcing the notion that America possesses a moral, divine right to do as it pleases for the betterment of humankind.
When former US President George W. Bush took it upon himself to 'restore democracy' in Iraq as part of the US-championed 'war on terror,' his ultimatum to the United Nations reflected both American entitlement and its rooted sense of exceptionalism. "You are either with us or with the terrorists," he said on September 21, 2001. According to that maxim, the world was divided into categories of 'moderates' and 'extremists,' 'with us' or 'against us,' 'Old Europe' and 'New Europe'', and so on. Despite the palpable irrationality - let alone arrogance - of that logic, US 'democratic' institutions and mainstream media cheered Bush on. The 'war president's' ratings seemed to increase as his rhetoric and actions grew more violent.
But the orchestrated 'popular consent' is finally breaking down, raising an unprecedented challenge to the notion of American exceptionalism, a banner under which America's ruling elites have long united. The more political chaos and societal division widen, the more the notion of exceptionalism will be exposed as bizarre, selfish, and unsustainable.
Surely, the storming of the US Congress will have global repercussions, not least among them the collective rejection of the outdated notion of American exceptionalism. But with that, there is also an opportunity: first for Americans to swap their 'manufactured consent' with real dialogue; to salvage and, eventually, renew trust in their democratic institutions and second, for the world to challenge America's hegemonic discourse of fraudulent democracy and other self-serving fables.
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Declining American Hegemony Could Be A Good Thing
'The declining global hegemony of the United States will be an opportunity to build better lives everywhere'
Oct 11, 2020
Recently, some of the "talking heads" on the news have been worrying about the demise of US global hegemony. We are told that the "American empire" is in decline and our influence and status around the world are falling. We are told that this bodes poorly for both the people of the United States and the rest of the world. That is not how I see it. While I tend to agree that the United States is losing its hegemony, I believe that all of us (in the USA and elsewhere) will be better off if the United States is no longer the "leader" of the world.
Our decline has been going on since the time of Richard Nixon, through Carter, the Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and has accelerated under Trump. The President's favoritism for the white and the rich, his erratic destruction of the administrative and diplomatic state, his complete inability to address COVID-19, his rejection of reason, science and expertise, his cultural ignorance, his meanness and cruelty, his selfish disregard for others (nations and peoples) all have underscored and advanced our national decline.
We have been taught to think that our country's position in the world stems in part from our status as the world's one true democracy, but it is now very clear that is not the case. Especially since Citizens United, political power in this country has prioritized wealth and those who have it. The United States is now a county "of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich." We have tax laws that favor capital over income; we have civil and criminal justice systems that protect property more than people; our public institutions routinely criminalize immigrants, the poor, and people of color.
If the new global "role models" are places like Denmark, Norway, or Costa Rica, surely the world would be headed towards fewer threats to peace, less military spending, fewer attacks on local democracies, more concern for human rights, less environmental destruction, more environmental protection, and more democracy. Our national elections are not decided by the popular vote, but instead by an archaic process based an unrepresentative group called the "electoral college." Our laws and policies reflect the interest of the wealthy as communicated to wealthy legislators by the lobbyists of big business. We have voting laws that make it a burden to vote for many. As a result, too often public policy does not reflect the opinions or interests of the majority. If it did, we would be like other developed countries and adopt national health care, paid parental leave, stronger controls on guns and weapons, free higher education, reproductive rights, and a higher minimum wage. If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that there are many more democratic nations in the world today. Their influence inevitably rises as ours falls and this is a good thing for everyone.
Much of the U. S. hegemony has stemmed from the fact that the United States is surely the most heavily armed and most militarily active country in the world. The national myth is that we use military force reluctantly and only when it is necessary to insure human rights, peace, and security. But let's look at the record: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Cuba, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Chile, Central America, Libya, Congo, Iran, Iraq, Panama, Afghanistan. Are any of these places were made better as a consequences of our covert and overt actions? We spend more on weapons of war than any other country in the world. Researchers at Brown University have found that since the horror of 9/11, the so-called "war on terrorism" has killed 800,000, displaced 37,000,000, and cost taxpayers $6.4 trillion.
We are told that the United States is the greatest, most productive and fairest economy in the world. It isn't. Over the last several years, our share of world production has declined significantly. Increasingly our economy is characterized by wide inequalities, environmental destruction, and decreasing life chances for the many. The earnings ratio between CEOs and their employees has widened dramatically. Bosses now earn as much as 400 times the incomes of their employees. Ordinary Americans no longer believe that future generations will have more comfortable lives than current ones. People of color in the United States face significant economic damage just because of their heritage and ethnicity.
President Trump did not create this situation, but he is making it worse. His administration's mishandling of COVID has driven down the lives of ordinary Americans. Unemployment is up; incomes are down; mass evictions are looming; GDP has collapsed; and all this is doubly true for persons of color. The only folks doing well are a few tech bosses and those who live off the stock market. In addition, the American economy is not sustainable environmentally. Since we no longer can claim any kind of real commitment to environmental protection, we can not even pretend to be an international leader in this area.
Out tax system is notoriously unfair and confusing. It favors the wealthy over the middle and working classes; it favors growth over maintenance and endurance; it favors corporations over families. We rescue banks from their unwise and sometimes criminal investments while allowing health care expenses to bankrupt ordinary people, who already live without paid medical or parental leave, decent vacations, or old age pensions (all commonplaces in developed and developing nations around the world). Americans live shorter and less healthy lives than people do in most developed nations. Our schools are nowhere near the best in the world, and many schools in poor and working class areas are so underfunded and under-resourced that they look more like tenements than campuses. They test and segregate more than they build and educate. Classes are large, standardized testing proliferates, teachers are underpaid, armed cops patrol the halls, and facilities are crumbling.
Simply put, we have nothing to teach the rest of the world about how to build an economy that serves the people. Many nations already know how to do it and hopefully, as we decline, they will become ready international examples of "best practices."
We have long believed we are the proverbial "city on the hill," a place that is home to a life so rewarding that it is a model for all. That emperor, too, has no clothes.
A supposed "nation of immigrants," we do not welcome newcomers. Instead, we attempt to deter migrants through practices of harassment, detention, and family separation.
The Coronavirus and the continuing trauma of police brutality have revealed that our society and its communities are unhealthy. Too often, residents have no trust in their government and see the police and other agencies as the agents of an occupying power. And people around the world recognize that we are a violent nation. Gun violence rages and mass shootings in schools, churches, nightclubs, and movie theaters have become distressingly common. Deadly police repression and practices of mass incarceration impact our communities, particularly neighborhoods of color. Guns and violence even characterize our entertainment media, which we export around the globe. "Hollywood" gets rich by displaying false and elaborately decorated images of fear, violence and anger. What does such an unreflectively violent place have to teach the rest of the world?
The cultural spread of a violent breed of radical individualism and the acceptance of deep inequalities are destroying the foundations of our society. "Looking out for number one" cannot form the basis of a livable, functioning community. Norms of reciprocity and equity suffer when people must struggle against each other to fulfill even the most basic needs such as food, clothing, housing and medical care. While many countries define the collective provision of basic needs as the necessary social infrastructure of a good society, we worry about something called the "nanny state." The few such programs we do have are inefficient and inadequate by design, rife with unnecessary administrative costs, bureaucratic means testing, and minimal resources. In many, if not most, developed nations ordinary people earn better wages, have better schools, live healthier lives, and are more secure and comfortable in communities where they feel respected, valued, and cared for.
So, it is very likely that the declining global hegemony of the United States will be an opportunity to build better lives everywhere. If the new global "role models" are places like Denmark, Norway, or Costa Rica, surely the world would be headed towards fewer threats to peace, less military spending, fewer attacks on local democracies, more concern for human rights, less environmental destruction, more environmental protection, and more democracy. And, if America uses this opportunity to change what we spend on and how we care for each other, life will be better here at home too.
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