By Fouâd Oveisy
Leftist politics often discounts the opposing camp’s strategy. In the leftist strategic imaginary, it is usually the case that a stagnating world is moved to progressive motion (or brought to a halt) by the left and its motors of history, a mindset reflected in the hegemony of the ‘establishment’ versus ‘radical left’ allegory of contemporary politics. Just as philosophy of praxis is the intellectual property of the left, or revolutionary transitions involve tasks to simply organize and accomplish by the left. When the political right is credited with an agency or a plan of its own, it is integrated into the iron laws of accumulation of capital or tied to the contradictions of the camp of capital. Mistakenly, the left tends to view components of a rightist grand strategy as manifestations of local or tactical aggressions and concessions. Often it is long after the event, decades into epochal transitions to a new era of capitalism such as neoliberalism, that the left catches up with the material and metaphysical ambitions of rightist projects.
Are we amid another such transition, now, and did and do the fronts represented by Bernie Sanders have a counterstrategy for it? Jeremy Corbyn and The Labour Party of England did not seem to have a Brexit strategy.
It will be immediately objected that bourgeois democracy “itself is the principal ideological lynchpin of Western capitalism, whose very existence deprives the working class of the idea of socialism as a different type of State.” And this is correct. It is absurd to argue that the left will simply take over a bourgeois party, because that is to forget the ultimate Marxist lesson that the Democratic Party is set up as a mode of production of rightwing power. Try to change the people in charge and the system produces the same old rightwing product (e.g. Hillary in 2016, likely Biden in 2020). All the same, I use the case of recent British and American elections as a foil to exhibit the limits of the objection. With or without a working class party, parliamentary elections and the political right’s reasons to win them remain of utmost strategic import to the global left, for the reasons that follow.
I recall an interview with Tony Blair in 2017 on some rightwing thinktank’s podcast. Blair’s unsolicited response to a question asked about potential threats to the United Kingdom’s security, with the interviewer listing adversaries ranging from China to global warming, was ‘Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders’. But the threat then and now was not as much that lefties such as Corbyn and Sanders might take power, but that they take it now that neoliberalism is mutating, capitalism is shifting to a multipolar world order, and the rest of the field are adjusting their transition plans to the emerging realities. State control by the left in this critical juncture, in respectively the oldest and biggest national territories of capitalism, was and is a nightmare scenario for capital. The rise of either of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn to supreme political relevance is of course a function of the latest crises of capitalism and liberalism; however, the camp of capital had and has plans of its own for steering this seismic shift to its own advantage. A sense of poise and urgency evidenced by the chiasmic contradictions of the pro Remain versus Leave capitalists in England, and the Hillary versus Trump contest in the United States.
In contrast, large factions of Labour’s metropolitan base were more or less sentimental about their Europeanness and lost sight of a historical mission and opportunity to fulfill: a leftist exit from a monopoly of capital on the way to perhaps, one day, a more decisive transition. After the left’s misadventure, no amount of promising the same old social democratic policy to the British masses (who proved more attuned to the event if not its articulation than their vanguard) compensated for lacking a clear and concrete strategy vis-à-vis a historical crisis and transition of capital that the Tories reengineered, campaigned on, and monopolized to win.
I will return to the Tories’ reasons. For now, it is more useful to resituate the contemporary left: not as the sole agent of transitions but as caught up in multiple counterrevolutionary transitions overseen by the political right at any point in time, anywhere in the world. Because the only thing that is clear at this point in history is that Marx did not live long enough to fully theorize, not outside The Eighteenth Brumaire, how capitalists might functionalize the contradictions of capital to their own advantage. And how they do this every time by re-functionalizing the crises of capital in transitions to new social orders, via fascism, neoliberalism or imperialism. What István Mészáros later called the “personification of capital” under different “forms of rule”.
True to Marx’s vision, capital self-expands despite and because of its immanent contradictions, but it is also true “there is no such thing as a process except in relations”. Economic and crucially political relations between the right and the left, capitalists and anti-capitalists. These dynamic relations lend themselves to visions and strategies devised to advantage the rule of one side over the other, in order to reproduce the metabolic asymmetry that is at the concrete core of Marx’s notion of class struggle. Perhaps then, after Benjamin’s formulation that the state of emergency has been made permanent, we must add that counterrevolutions are no longer the political right’s reactions to leftist events but rather the movement of the status quo made permanent.
Leftist organizing remains central to balancing this asymmetry and steering a world moved by the algorithms, machines, images and weapons of capitalists and their cronies. Masses are both force and lever in any socialist transition. But to continue to presume that we might ‘one day’ eclipse the enemy’s hegemony by simply growing popular leftist fronts is to reproduce, once more, a domesticated and “internalist” copy of Marx. A well-documented strategic fact that somehow continues to elude leftist organizing.
The consequences of the left’s internalist modus operandi are more severe in practice. First, the prevalent lack of a counter-counterrevolutionary strategy in both theory and practice, as in the war of position waged in England over Brexit, and the war of maneuver in Rojava over the future of the Middle East (I have written extensively about the latter dynamic). It is as if egalitarian mobilization will readily overcome wave after wave of counterrevolutionary force and cunning that either overwhelms or exploits the strengths and weaknesses of egalitarian mobilization. And when it takes generations to develop a revolutionary base and cadre, but only years of counterrevolution to lose them to corruption or crackdown. Indeed, by some accounts a founding text of the American Cold War era strategy, George Kennan’s The Sources of Soviet Conduct works with the premise that the Soviets organize and strategize around and through their historical mission to create a classless society –– that thing Lenin called fighting not against but for something. And insofar as the United States manages to drag the Soviets time and time again into difficult political situations where they are forced to make poor or immoral decisions, the collective Soviet faith in their collective mission will deteriorate and, over the long term, the USSR hegemony will collapse internally. Essentially, Kennan advises disarming, confusing and then finishing off the Soviets made hopeless, and he teaches that cunning may ultimately outmanoeuvre any egalitarian hypothesis. The rest is history, even if Kennan’s imperialist strategy is not the only reason that the late Soviet market socialist, state-capitalist machine came apart. Kennan’s intervention did however provide external impetus to the domination of hierarchical forms of capital over Soviet politics and economics.
The allegory about Kennan also leads to a second and cofounding consequence of the left’s internalist presumptions: the priority of the domestic and national conduct of politics and economics over the international, and to that extent the foreclosure of the imperialist foundations of the hegemonies of domestic capital and the international divisions of both labor and force. A criticism as old as Marx’s Capital but somehow sidelined ever since.
Of course, as I write, the battlefield is enormous and the left is in retreat (despite what one might see or hear). Often we focus on local resistances just to remain relevant. But as witnessed in the Grexit and then the Brexit storylines, the problem and the problem makers are no longer local. Critically, no socialist transition will readily redistribute, at the domestic level, the global foundations of a local capitalist economy, and not when any major capitalist economy is first and foremost a war economy. A war machine not only for neocolonial loot, imposing structural advantages on markets, legitimizing the markets’ juridico-political organs (e.g. the UN or IMF), and ultimately reproducing the material advantages of metropolitan working classes in the West over their counterparts in the peripheries. But also, as W. E. B. Du Bois articulated the relation between the “poor white worker” and the “black slave” long ago, a metropolitan war machine privileges “the vanity” of its domestic working classes. The capitalist war economy forges hegemony domestically, and pauperizes working-class solidarity internationally.
If the American and British underclasses have been exhibiting signs of rebellion against their ‘establishment(s)’, in the first and crucial instance this is due to their deteriorating living conditions, and then it is because the empire and its prospects are waning. In 2018, I spoke to fishermen in Scotland who could not fish because Scandinavian fishing giants were cleansing the sea floor from the small fish and crustaceans that sustained the underwater ecosystem vital to fishing Cod or Halibut. And I spoke to farmers in northern England and they were angrier, but mainly about Corbyn’s refusal to see that England could not ‘punch above its weight in Europe anymore’. The empire no longer provides because it cannot. There is a humility in this admission that is lacking in the leftist vanguard’s hyped up visions of social democracy or autonomy.
Indeed, the general mood in the United States is and has been ‘fearful’ for a decade, and not only in the 2008 recession’s aftermath. The ‘efficient’ rise of Chinese state capitalism, and the imperialist ambitions that go with it and sustain it, are serving as an alternative model of capitalist development and hegemony for expansionist states contending for the markets, from Russia to Turkey and Iran, and also for the old national and liberal territories of capital. In this new economic and political climate, the American working and middle classes are feeling the tides of China’s rise and a global reversal of old fortunes. They are growing weary of the waning prospects of the United States and its liberal vision of the world markets, because everyone knows that the United States is not economically, militarily and ideologically hegemonic anymore.
In the first place, the asymmetric accumulations of industrial capital and military superiority, which once founded and propelled the advantages of Western capitalism at the expense of the peripheries, are no longer as lopsided or decisive (for many reasons that I cannot review here). Without this advantage, a multitude of peripheral states and multinational corporations chip away at the West’s monopoly over the markets, and further the erosion of old advantages. In the meantime, accumulating the old advantages came at the expense of making a mockery of the West’s cultural values, in the name of which colonialist and imperialist wars were waged in the peripheries. Now, the postcolonial capitalist states in charge of the peripheries harness this mockery to assert the rule of local and regional social imaginaries, from Modi’s Hindu vision of India to Putin’s Eurasianism. They do this because holistic visions of autochthonous organicity seamlessly supplement local and ‘natural’ transitions to the (Chinese) authoritarian capitalist mode of production.
In this critical conjuncture, Western capital, no longer capable of bankrolling its middle and working classes’ social welfare at the expense of the encroaching peripheries, risks losing State control to the likes of Corbyn and Sanders. Herein lies the political import of the recent English and American elections despite their bourgeois form, and also what they revealed about a proportionate leftist strategy or its lack thereof. I will return to this point after outlining the camp of capital’s own response to the crisis.
Western capital had two ways out of the mess. The first was Obama and Clinton’s vision of forming new economic blocs, the likes of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is a strategy of pulling the resources of Western and developing capitalist states together in order to create larger markets. Markets capable of competing in terms of size and diversity of the labour pool with the Chinese alternative. Raising the minimum wage, providing ‘Obamacare’, etc., would serve to ‘dampen’ the havoc these new markets would wreak on the lives of the domestic working classes of the new blocs. As for the foreign policy of this market strategy, the United States would continue to guarantee the military security of these blocs as it did for the post-WWII blocs of capital in Europe and the Pacific, nearly a century ago. In this way Obama foreign policy’s historic “pivot to China” followed in short order, requiring new deputies such as Iran along the way in critical geopolitical junctions, and securing the new alliances with the likes of the historic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement.
Then there is Brexit and Trump’s bolder vision: accept Anglo-America’s diminished role and place in the emerging new order, but with a safe and ‘graceful’ transition for US and English capital. As for the working classes, make American and British labour ‘more competitive’ by gutting its welfare and social protections even further, and so lower its price (wage) for capital and reverse the flow of jobs over the long-term. Then close the domestic labour markets to the foreign worker with a dash of fascism added to make it all organic and ‘democratic’. A strongman like Trump requires such a base if he is going to war against the neoliberal establishment and the working classes. On the foreign policy front, not needing to secure the frontiers and market access for other economies, the task is to reimagine the NATO and resurrect old allies such as the Saudis and Turkey who share the new vision (even find a ‘frenemy’ in Russia). Make ‘bilateral trade agreements’ the keyword here because China aside the United States has no one to fear in asymmetric two or three-way trade agreements. As for China, the need to restrain its imperial ambitions being unavoidable one way or another, start a trade war and transform Obama’s pivot into the “Indo-Pacific Partnership”. A logistical sphere of regional states fearful of China’s rise, from India to Australia, which surround China and its naval trade routes with US allies should push ever come to shove.
Here, neither the need for the anarchic force of “interstate politics” to steer the course of capital’s latest crisis (symptomatic of Italian, Dutch and British capital’s fall from hegemony in bygone eras), nor capital’s turn to statism to harness the crisis (found in Roosevelt’s post-Depression New Deal and Hitler’ Reich) is really new. It is really the same old neoliberalism but after a dialectical turn, mutated. The ‘free market’ still prevails because it never existed; austerity remains austerity. Only, the markets are discarding their ideological husks and what is perhaps different is the postcolonial additive of capital’s latest iteration. Neoliberalism is fulfilling its mission to ‘end history’ by fully coopting vernacular capital(s); a global capitalism with many indigenous and civilizational faces.
Indeed, the political right is writing openly about the new realities and their impending embrace by establishment Western liberal democracies. Obama’s friend, Emanuel Macron, dealing with his own revolting working class, Le Pen and Mélenchon, and catching up with the frivolous prospects of a TTP or TTIP bloc after Trump withdrew the United States from these treaties on his first day in the White House, has been gradually transforming France’s domestic and foreign policies into establishment copies of Trump and Brexit’s vision. It is almost safe to predict that if and when Sanders loses to Biden, no matter who wins the White House in November it will be Trump and Brexit’s vision that prevails in Washington for the foreseeable future.
This new climate casts the political right’s candidates in a favourable light. When Johnson promises harnessing the new realities with harsh but familiar measures, Corbyn promises revolutionizing it but seemingly without a grand vision or plan. Here, the political right’s candidates are viewed as capable because they are of the system and as ruthless as the leaders of contender states led by Putin, Macron or Erdogan. Just as what Trump and his base call ‘the establishment’ (e.g. the corruptors of capitalism) is not the same as Sanders’s referend of the same term (e.g. the corruption of capitalism), which should provide some commentary on populism as a sensible leftist strategy and on why Sanders has not done as well as hyped or hoped with working class constituencies that he promised to wrest away from Trump.
The Sanders campaign somehow misread the signs of the times, even if many on the left have been warning about the new manifestations of neoliberalism for some time, and Trump’s ways of harnessing them. Indeed, despite his promise to organize a revolution, Sanders offered the past, i.e. America now Scandinavia, when Scandinavia is sinking into crisis and fascism. The Sanders message might have been ‘new’ in the context of US politics, it is transformative and necessary, but it banked on a populism without a popular vision. He resorted to hackneyed syndicalist programs of organizing people around particular demands when he should have assumed the mantle of a strategist and ideologue who reimagines and reorganizes the chaos in broad and concrete strokes, as Lenin once did. If the masses of Detroit, Michigan shifted back to the centre and voted for Biden, it was because Sanders’s timid vision could never compete with the anarchy Trump is wreaking on the working class lives. Leftist politics has once again discounted the opposing camp’s strategy, and the ‘Sanders revolution’ was lacking a boldly revolutionary vision because of its provincial and internalist mindset and vanguard.
However, it is for all the reasons outlined above that the Sanders movement must pass the test of this critical political conjecture and win in November –– and hopefully it is not too late. But I will not offer a domestic version of such a winning strategy here. Bernie’s growing movement needs to envision, educate and articulate its domestic strategy at the grassroots. Just as we need to organize the working masses around epochal and concrete visions of mass transformations by educating and empowering a strategic mindset at the grassroots. Rather, I focus on Sanders’s foreign policy. First to demonstrate how the internalism and provincialism of his ‘revolution’ poses a threat to revolutionary politics elsewhere, especially in Iran. And then to relate the timidity of his revolutionary vision for Americans to the ambiguity and absurdity of his foreign policy plans. I make the point that transitioning to socialism will remain out of reach insofar as the left refuses a proactive and internationalist politics that steers the historical course of global capital against the grain of local capitalism. For this task we need the humility of accepting that we (and the working classes) are not the sole motor of history, and that we must use capital’s will-to-anarchy everywhere as a motor of developing anti-capitalism anywhere.
On the way to such a vision and strategy, we need to disavow internalist modes of leftism that find their epitome in Slavoj Žižek’s naive proclamations of four years ago, about an utter lack of distinction between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. An indistinctness that translated domestically into prisons for migrant children, and internationally as wars, ethnic cleansings and coups sponsored by Trump’s cronies in Yemen and Bolivia. Critically, the grand master’s pseudo-strategic prescription, i.e. the deteriorating state of life under Trump will ‘wake up’ the masses, was seemingly clueless about the mutating state of neoliberalism (to which the masses were already waking up at the time). Painfully, it reeked of the same romantic and humanist naivety that he ridicules elsewhere. Otherwise, he would and should have made a distinction between the establishment’s ‘liberal’ neoliberalism, and the coming establishment’s authoritarian neoliberalism. As Judith Butler remarked four years ago, under Hillary we would not lose so much ground to fascism on top of everything else –– and she was right.
It could be that we are finally headed for a world police state, and Žižek’s prescription did after all accelerate the dawn of a decisive global struggle! The trouble is that the left is awfully shorthanded in such military matters, when it delegates state control to the likes of Trump and with no alternative in store but ‘waking up’. The United States spends more than 20% of the proceeds of the largest war economy in the world on its military apparatuses. With close to 3.2 million active employees, the US military is also the largest employer in the world, with millions more affiliated as off-duty members, veterans, or families and dependents of members and veterans. And all this in a country where the wider population is marked, as Perry Anderson put it, “by the provincialism of an electorate with minimal knowledge of the outside world, and a political system that has increasingly given virtually untrammeled power to the executive in the conduct of foreign affairs, freeing presidencies, often baulked of domestic goals by fractious legislatures, to act without comparable cross-cutting pressures abroad.” It is simplistic to suggest that socializing domestic US economics and politics can happen without dismantling and replacing its largest and most powerful corporate conglomerate, the US military industrial complex and its political wings in the Pentagon and the State Department. It is just as absurd to suggest that accelerating this undemocratic juggernaut, toward a final confrontation or collision course with China, might somehow inspire the pauperized masses of the world to unite and revolt. Quite the contrary, and more so in a country with entrenched capitalist convictions and habits.
Žižek’s provincial politics ultimately forced the masses to the ‘safe’ centre. And so it is even more absurd when Sanders promises an unworkable vision of US foreign policy to guide and steer his revolution in today’s turbulent global waters. The US left must hold its “revolutionary” leaders to higher standards.
Sanders’ mediocre foreign policy record as a senator speaks for itself. His intention to continue to drone to the near and middle East will not age well either. On the question of Ukraine and Russia, “the framework put in place by the Obama Administration” seems to work for a hypothetical Sanders administration. It even foresee strengthening the sanctions on Russia, a strategy that has only strengthened the monopoly of oligarchic capital in Russia. His position on “Africa” (as a whole) is less ambiguous: “America must create room for Africa to play a greater role in setting the global agenda”, which is perhaps a good start, only it is “global institutions like the IMF, World Bank and UN Security Council” that should “take charge” here. I will return to Saudi Arabia later, because Sanders correctly recognizes that “relying on corrupt authoritarian regimes to deliver us security is a losing bet”, which is an improvement over his 2016 campaign mode of insisting that Saudi Arabia provide its fair share of the cost of global wars. As for what inspires Sanders, the greatest foreign policy accomplishment of the United States since WWII was the Marshall Plan, because “we helped rebuild their economies, spending the equivalent of $130 billion just to reconstruct Western Europe after World War II.” This is the same vision that in its Pacific counterpart put the Japanese Zaibatsu, the top criminal and capitalist class of Japan before and during the WWII, back in charge of Japan in order to quell the rising tide of postwar Japanese socialism. It is the same plan that set up the west German keystone of American imperialism against the spread of Soviet socialism to western Europe.
But Sanders is also vehemently anti-TPP and TTIP; he recognizes that the “authoritarian” mode of Chinese capitalism is an ever bigger global threat. He admirably remarks: “Right-wing authoritarians backed by a network of multi-billionaire oligarchs are forming a common front. We who believe in democracy must join together to build a progressive global order based on human solidarity.” To be fair he does identify the problem of the mutation of capital that I outlined above, even if this recognition is bereft of a vision or strategy to supplement it. However, putting his overall vision together, from bits and pieces gathered from other sources and interviews, adds up to a post-Trump Obama 2.0 foreign policy plan. For example, to quote the entirety of his response on Iran in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations:
The agreement achieved by the US, Europe, Russia and China with Iran is one of the strongest anti-nuclear agreements ever negotiated. It prevented a war and blocked Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. I would re-enter the agreement on day one of my presidency and then work with the P5+1 and Iran to build upon it with additional measures to further block any path to a nuclear weapon, restrain Iran’s offensive actions in the region and forge a new strategic balance in the Middle East.
It is indeed a great idea to remove the sanctions on Iran, but beyond that the Sanders plan falls apart from its inner inconsistencies. And here the devil is once again in the fluid context.
The recent removal of fuel subsidies — which sparked the last round of Iran protests in November of 2019 — were part of a larger program of surgical austerity politics in Iran that prepares the country’s bourgeoning state capitalism for the deregulated free markets. Indeed, the Iranian Reformists who engineered and brokered the JCPOA agreement with Obama have been at the forefront of injecting neoliberal austerity measures into the Iranian economy, destroying working class movements and unions inside Iran, and the killing, incarcerating and harassing of Iranian labour leaders and activists. Such measures are taken to make Iran’s young labour market ‘appealing’ to global capital (a la Trump’s war on American labour) and with a view of a reconciliation deal between Iran and the US, which is a highly welcome prospect for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s imperilled political establishment. The IRI is suffering from the most severe crisis of democratic legitimacy inside Iran since the 1979 revolution (with only about 30% of the population voting at the last round of parliamentary elections in Iran). Here, the JCPOA’s unequivocal reinstatement would effectively amount to a legal and official sanction of the IRI establishment by its declared mortal enemy and the international state system. Critically, the recognition restores the IRI establishment to domestic legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian bourgeoisie who are unhappy with the economic pitfalls of IRI’s nuclear adventurism, and further sidelines the radical aspirations of the oppressed labour, women, democracy and student movements inside Iran.
It will be objected that with or without the JCPOA, Iran will stay the current oppressive course. This is correct. It will be objected that without the JCPOA, Iran might opt for a military nuclear program. This is also correct, even if it is true that Iran might well go nuclear sooner or later, without or without such an agreement. It will be objected that Sanders has promised to pair the JCPOA’s reinstatement with putting pressure on IRI’s human rights’ record. This too is correct; however, it is not altogether clear why Sanders will not negotiate another deal with Iran that empowers the various democracy and labour movements in Iran while addressing the stated concerns. And if Sanders refuses to ‘intervene’ altogether, it is a prospect all-the-more promising; all Middle Eastern people await such a day. The trouble, however, is that he intends to intervene in the name of the left and, seemingly, at the expense of the Middle Eastern left. Just as the Sanders plan is to work with the Turkish state “in a way that recognizes the rights of the Kurds”, when Sanders should be speaking of building an alliance with the pro-labour and pro-minority rights People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the millions that back its grassroots movement in Turkey. What is more, under the banners of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Peoples’ and Women’s Protection Units (YPG/J), ‘the Kurds’ have been struggling against NATO’s second largest army in Turkey for more than four decades; the PKK has one of the largest active bodies of leftist and anti-capitalist membership anywhere and across the world. The Sanders foreign policy’s language is both statist and patronizing.
Critically, when it comes to intervening against IRI, it is not clear how a Sanders administration would “restrain IRI’s offensive actions in the region and forge a new strategic balance in the Middle East”. I have written extensively about the ways in which IRI’s genocidal games in Syria were instrumental simultaneously to giving the Iranian Reformists leverage in the JCPOA negotiations, and to holding down the labour and democracy movements inside Iran in the name of securing Iran against ‘external influence’ (that old redbaiting excuse). This was the same hybrid IRI strategy executed mercilessly by the same General Qassem Soleimani that some on the left were mourning earlier this year. Obama promised IRI the long-term prospect of entry to global markets and acting as the new US deputy in the Middle East (which drove the Saudis and Israelis completely mad), in return for improved behaviour in the region and especially in a Syrian conflict that was instrumental to his pivot to Asia –– I will return to this last point. Heavy US military presence in and around the region was the stick holding our the carrot to IRI.
Now, Sanders promises to reinstate the same old JCPOA, and contain IRI in the Middle East –– when the Syrian, Yemeni and Libyan civil war maps have entirely changed since Trump’s withdrawal from JCPOA –– and then to withdraw US troops from the Middle East in the meantime! It is not entirely clear what stops (in this plan) the IRI’s savvy and ruthless decision makers from exploiting the strategic loopholes of the Sanders logic. In this plan, they could transition the Iranian economy to the capitalist markets with a Sanders sanction, strangle the remainder of radical movements inside Iran and bury them under the neoliberal media’s forthcoming celebrations of ‘Iran’s return to normalcy’, and then add a military nuclear program in due and opportune time, for good measure.
What is however clear is the domestic logic of the Sanders foreign policy plans for Iran. Only weeks after the latest round of Iran Protests, during which the IRI regime killed between 500-1500 protestors, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met with the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the Iranian diaspora equivalent of the Israeli American Council (IAC) and AIPAC. As an unofficial IRI lobby tried in American courts for its explicit and implicit links to the Reformist establishment in Iran, NIAC’s executive body has been at the forefront of whitewashing, falsifying and defending the IRI’s bloody suppression of the latest round of Iran Protests. Opinion pieces by NIAC’s executives in The New York Times and The Independent even fooled Democracy Now into hosting a renowned IRI ideologue as an ‘expert’ on Iranian politics and Iran Protests. NIAC’s promise to Sanders or Warren could have been the millions of bourgeoise Iranian-Americans living in crucial election states such as California, over whom NIAC exerts massive and systematic influence as a demographic and donor base. After all, NIAC represents the largest network of Iranian–American capital and NIAC has been quite explicit about the harms of Trump’s Maximum Pressure campaign for the interests of Iranian capital represented by the IRI Reformists. And so NIAC members campaigned long and hard for Sanders. Even Noam Chomsky appeared in a NIAC forum to campaign for Sanders, in a panel alongside one of the writers of the infamous, vicious and ultimately withdrawn academic letter on condemning the Iran Protests and its incarcerated student leaders.
I cannot wager on whether Sanders was aware of NIAC’s machinations or not. Ultimately, his plans for effecting a socialist transition in the US were tied to effecting a transition to global capitalism in Iran under the auspices of IRI. This seems to also contradict his point on the Saudis and not ‘betting on corrupt authoritarian regimes’. Critically, and here we come full circle, the stretch of land jointly held by Iran in Syria (with Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal army) happens to coincide with the land map of China’s new Silk Road. The new silk road is one of the ways in which China plans to bypass the Indo-Pacific partnership arrayed against its trade routes, and so, following in Obama’s footsteps, a hypothetical Sanders administration would be ‘wise’ to flip the land and its expansionist and neocolonialist owners in Syria for a profit. Here it is not as much the geopolitics of the new silk road that is at stake but the imperialist intentions and claims to impose and reaffirm. It is no secret that Sanders has been outspokenly for containing China militarily with the help of the “international community”. But I cannot wager on whether this is all an unfortunate coincidence or not, because Sanders offers no concrete vision of his Chinese foreign policy either.
Regardless, it is altogether not clear how a Sanders administration would “build a progressive global order based on human solidarity”, when it seemingly plans to resurrect the Obama axis in the Middle East and utilize it toward maintaining imperialist American interests in the region, against the encroachments of Chinese neoliberalism. It is not clear how the Sanders vision of a socialist transition inside the US might benefit, in the long run, from destroying one of the oldest labour movements in the Middle East in Iran. It is not also clear what is revolutionary or even remotely innovative about the overall Sanders foreign policy vision. It is indeed misguided to claim that Sanders is “rethinking the fundamental position of the United States in the world.” In the best case scenario, what Sanders seems to offer the Middle East is not human solidarity but dumb solidarity.
For all these reasons, the Western left must hold its leaders as well as its popular base to higher standards. By virtue of its monopoly over radical and academic media in the West, the Western left is prone to amplifying its own ideological blind spots vis-à-vis dilemmas of domestic and foreign policy elsewhere. To that extent, entities such as NIAC and IRI, and the neoliberal media anywhere, might functionalize the Western left’s false and unsuspecting narratives in order to burry dissenting voices from the subaltern left in places like Iran and the Middle East and to monstrous ends. It is high time that we on the left practice meaningful and strategic international solidarity against the mutating state of neoliberalism and late capitalism.
