A Feature, Not a Bug: How Henry Kissinger is a Symbol of a Broader American Imperial Rot

By Sudip Bhattacharya

As legendary English metal band Iron Maiden sang in a 1988 track, “Only the good die young. All the evil seem to live forever.” Enter Henry Kissinger.

On May 27th, 2023, the former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor turned 100 years old. As Kissinger begins his second century on this planet, he remains a beloved figure within America’s political class. His multiple birthday parties were attended by many A-listers including Democrats John Kerry and Michael Bloomberg, and Republican James Baker. Yes, the elite outpouring for Dr. K — as Kissinger is affectionately known in establishment circles — is a bipartisan affair. But the exploited and colonized masses hold a much different view of the so-called diplomat.

Across the Third World, Kissinger’s legacy is that of a heartless war criminal. In the Nixon administration, Kissinger supported some of the world’s most brutal right-wing regimes in places like Argentina and Chile. He also greenlighted mass slaughters of Bangladeshis and the Timorese.

In a groundbreaking piece for The Intercept, Nick Turse analyzes formerly classified documents to uncover mass killings of Cambodian civilians during the Nixon era. Transcripts of calls unearthed by Turse prove Kissinger’s direct role in these massacres. In one particularly ominous phone conversation, Kissinger ordered a general to kill “anything that moves” with “anything that flies.”

This savage commitment to expanding American hegemony at all costs has left an indelible mark. Kissinger’s ideology is now a feature — not a bug — of the United States foreign policy establishment. So much so, in fact, that many of his diplomatic successors are even more extreme than him.

Revitalizing Empire

Henry Kissinger emerged at a time of mounting skepticisim toward American empire and the institutions that uphold it. In 1975, the Senate almost unanimously approved the creation of the bipartisan Church Committee — a body investigating security state abuses. At the same time, the Republican Party was home to the late Representative Paul Findley. The congressman from Illinois was fiercely pro-Palestine and anti-war. Findley couldn’t exist in today’s radicalized GOP, where support for Israeli apartheid and the war machine are prerequisites for membership.

Kissinger, alongside other odious characters like the Dulles brothers, represented a backlash to these currents. Dr. K was a staunch cold warrior. He believed strongly in using American military might to eliminate communism and defend corporate profitability at all costs.

And he found ideological allies in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The agency’s upper echelons were full of anti-communist stalwarts and other extremist elements. As Stephen Kinzer writes in Overthrow, leaders of the CIA outright dismissed anything that might interfere with the aims of American multinationals.

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While occupying America’s most powerful diplomatic posts, Kissinger was a steward of this tendency. In fact, he accelerated and intensified some of the worst pattens already bubbling within the security state. While preaching diplomacy publicly, Kissinger showed an unnerving stomach for bombings and the so-called collateral damage they caused. This earned him favor among the morally bankrupt conservative and liberal elite. In 1973, they awarded Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize despite him never meeting a war he did not like.

This underscores a reality that is fundamental to understanding Kissinger’s place in history. While Dr. K was a reaction to some currents within the American foreign policy scene, he was an intensification of others. In this sense, Kissinger was no anomaly. So much of the political establishment agreed with his ideas and participated in their implementation.

American Imperialism As a Bipartisan Project

After Nixon resigned in disgrace, and Gerald Ford lost the 1976 election, it became clear Kissinger had made an impression. On January 1st, 1977, Democratic President Jimmy Carter took office. Despite not occupying a spot in the opposition party’s new administration, Kissinger’s foreign policy proceeded apace. Carter even appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski — a sort of Democratic Kissinger — to be his Secretary of Defense.

Together, Carter and Brzezinski instituted policies Kissinger would have been proud of — and probably was. The duo funded the Mujahideen — and, by extension, Osama bin Laden — to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Anti-communism was the overriding imperative, even if it involved supporting theocratic armies who threw acid on women learning to read.

But the Carter administration was short-lived. The Georgia native lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. But, while Carter and Brzezinski left office, Kissinger’s legacy most certainly did not.
The hard-right Reagan personified authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and American exceptionalism on steroids. While he claimed to want dialogue with the Soviets, Reagan funded extreme anti-communist groups throughout Central America. He also invaded Grenada and toppled its government following the country’s socialist revolution.

Kissinger’s imperial fervor continued into the Clinton years. The Democratic administration of the 1990s subjected Iraq to a brutal sanctions regime, killing thousands of Iraqis through deprivation. Clinton also opted to continue the Cuban embargo, which remains in place to this day.

After Clinton came George W. Bush, whose War on Terror exemplified the Kissinger protocol: non-stop intervention and destabilization with overtures to diplomacy and the proliferation of rights and freedom. Obama then advanced this protocol further still, albeit less intensely, but was nonetheless very much beholden to military intervention. He punished the Middle East in particular with drone strikes, sanctions, and alliances with Islamic militants and the Israeli state. Not to mention that fact that Obama turned a blind eye to Saudi war crimes against innocent Yemeni civilians.

Essentially, Kissinger’s views carried forth in spirit with every subsequent administration. Ironically, too, the “Kissinger effect” has led to elements within the foreign policy establishment becoming even more radicalized than him. Contemporary US-China relations provides seemingly endless examples of this.

Both Biden and Trump officials often signal their willingness to rachet tensions with China. Mike Pompeo, who Trump appointed to head the CIA and State Department, claims Xi Jinping seeks world domination. The current Secretary of State Antony Blinken has voiced similar sentiments. During his confirmation hearing, Blinken told the Senate that “China posed the most significant challenge… of any nation.” He has also accused the country of “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” “repression,” and “crackdown[s] of basic rights.”

Kissinger sounds dovish by comparison. In a recent interview with The Economist, he stressed the importance of maintaining friendly US-China relations. Kissinger also poured cold water on some of the more gauche sinophobic hysterics. He insists Xi Jinping is not the next Hitler and that China has no plans of world domination. According to Kissinger, the Asian powerhouse does not even seek to impose its culture abroad.

a cog in a rotten system

In the end, Henry Kissinger must face justice. But we should aso view him as part of a broader network of war criminals. And that network is both continually expanding and a revolving door. Recently, President Joe Biden nominated Elliot Abrams — a man notorious for atrocities in Central America — to a federal diplomacy commission. Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump had made Abrams his Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela.

Those serious about overturning American imperium must address Kissinger and the forces beyond him — many of which he has inspired. True justice for the victims of United States foreign policy means nothing short of wholesale change to the entire apparatus. It is not just about punishing Kissinger but also stopping future Kissingers from ascending to power and harming more innocents.

This is a daunting task. United States progressives are already struggling to confront domestic issues, let alone global ones. Still, the task remains. To create a free and friendly world for the working class and the oppressed globally, the American empire must crumble. Its Kissingers must fall. While Dr. K may celebrate another birthday soon enough, it’s our responsibility to create a landscape that celebrates humanity instead.

Sudip Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate in political science at Rutgers University. He also has a background as a reporter and continues to write for major outlets from Current Affairs to Protean and The Progressive.

Elias Khoury is the managing editor of the Hampton Institute.

Our Freedoms Shrink as Our Military Expands

By Brad Wolf

Republished from Counterpunch.

The Merchants of Death even own our sidewalks. That’s what we were told when we arrived at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, Virginia, on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to issue a “Contempt Citation” for Raytheon’s failure to comply with a subpoena issued last November by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a People’s Tribunal scheduled for November of 2023.

Raytheon knew we were coming. The police were waiting and would not permit us to enter the enormous building even though other businesses and a public restaurant resided inside. “You’re not allowed in,” the police said. “The owner of the building said no to you.” Others were free to enter for lunch or to conduct business. The officers were polite. Respectful. “We are only doing our job,” they said, seeming more like a hired corporate police force than a public police force.

“And you cannot remain on the sidewalk,” the police said. We responded that it was a public sidewalk. “Not anymore,” the police said. “Raytheon bought the sidewalk. And the sidewalk across the street.” When asked how a private corporation can buy a public sidewalk, the officers shrugged not knowing the answer. “You can move down there,” they said, pointing to a corner across the busy street.

We asked to see a deed proving this bizarre acquisition of public property. Lo and behold, the police dutifully produced a deed stamped by the recorder of deeds office indicating Raytheon did in fact own the sidewalk all the way to the street.

Using US tax dollars, including the dollars of those of us who stood there, Raytheon bought up the very freedom they claim they’re building weapons to defend. Freedom of speech and assembly is drastically reduced when corporations as powerful as Raytheon control the halls of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, and our corporate media.

In fact, in the belly of the beast of the Raytheon building was the corporate media itself, an ABC television affiliate which refused to talk to us last November. When we had approached an ABC spokesman outside, they refused to admit they worked for ABC despite wearing ABC attire. From corporate wars to corporate police to corporate media, all in one monstrous, taxpayer-funded building.

In 2023, approximately $858 billion will be taken from the paychecks of US citizens to help squelch our most fundamental Constitutional rights of privacy and assembly.

Across the street from Raytheon, we unfurled our banners and carried our signs. We held Raytheon in contempt for refusing to comply to a subpoena issued by the people of the world. We noted their shame of their own corporate behavior such that they purchased police and public sidewalks to keep public scrutiny away.

A young woman approached, noticing our signs. She was an Afghan refugee who had been there during the invasion. She and her family had suffered immensely from the US bombing. Her father barely made it out alive. She was crying as she spoke. Off to the side, a man in a suit carefully took pictures of each of us. We were photographed everywhere we went this Valentine’s Day.

To evidence Raytheon’s complicity in war crimes, we read the names of the 34 victims—26 of them schoolboys—killed in the horrific 2018 bombing of a school bus in Yemen. The bomb, a 500-pound Paveway laser-guided bomb was made by Lockheed Martin while Raytheon was responsible for the infrared system which targeted the bus.

Under the careful eye of our National Security State, we traveled to the Pentagon to deliver a subpoena compelling Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to testify before the Tribunal. Mr. Austin, before being Secretary of Defense was, of course, on the Board of Directors at Raytheon. This, after retiring from the military.

Mr. Austin had cashed in at Raytheon and was now in the catbird seat at the Pentagon sending billion-dollar contracts to his former employer. He is certain to cash in a second time when he leaves his current office. And so, we had a subpoena asking Secretary Austin to speak about these allegations epitomizing the “Revolving Door” between the military, defense contractors, and public office.

A dozen police waited. They counted the number in our group making hand signals between themselves. “You’ve just come from the Raytheon building,” they said to me. “And you plan on spending one hour here. And then you’re going to the Hyatt Hotel for a protest.” I asked how they knew that, especially the information about the Hyatt Hotel since that had not been made public, and the police officer smiled and said, “We have our ways.”

We were told we could protest in a small, fenced-in grassy area away from the metro stop, out of sight from most. We, the people, had been corralled behind a fence in a small grassy patch to peacefully exercise our freedom of speech as the billion-dollar behemoth of war and death, surveillance and repression, stood before us.

Similar actions of subpoena delivery had been carried out the same day in San Diego, California; Asheville, North Carolina; and New York City. Surveillance and corporate resistance had occurred at each location.

Valentine’s Day, this day meant for the opening of hearts, was one of recognizing the Orwellian state in which we live, funded by our own dollars. Our military not only consumes our money, but our freedoms as well.

We again read the names of the dead, sang, some prayed. As we were leaving, one of the police officers cheerfully said, “It’s 64° outside and a beautiful day. Why not enjoy it and go play golf.” A frightfully common thought in such perilous times.

Brad Wolf is a former prosecutor, professor, and college dean.  He is the Executive Director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster and writes for numerous publications.

Biden Lies at the United Nations

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

It takes a special kind of hubris for a president of the United States to speak at the United Nations, the place where international law is supposed to be upheld and defended. Yet the representative of the worst violator of international law predictably shows up every September when the United Nations General Assembly holds its annual session. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez got it right when he spoke in 2006:

“Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world. I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation, and pillage of the peoples of the world.”

Chavez is no longer with us, and Joe Biden is the third man to serve as U.S. president since George W. Bush was compared to the devil. But the words are as true now as they were then. This year Biden’s speech was replete with the usual drivel about the United States being some sort of guarantor of peace. Among other things, he said that permanent members of the Security Council should “...refrain from the use of the veto, except in rare, extraordinary situations, to ensure that the Council remains credible and effective.”

Perhaps Biden thinks that the rest of the world has amnesia. Every time the members of UN General Assembly condemn Israeli apartheid it is the U.S. that predictably steps in with a Security Council veto to protect its ally and partner in crime. Twelve of the 14 U.S. vetoes since 2000 were made on behalf of Israel. Any U.S. proposal calling for change in the Security Council structure is intended to weaken China and Russia’s veto power and to bring in its own puppets such as Germany and Japan.

Of course, Russia bashing was the focus of Biden’s speech with false claims of a nuclear threat, unprovoked attack, and accusations of war crimes. He didn’t mention well documented Ukrainian war crimes such as the shelling of civilians in Donetsk. Worse yet, there was no acknowledgement that Ukraine and Russia were negotiating until the U.S. and the U.K. intervened and scuttled the talks. Biden’s speech was full of projection and every condemnation leveled against Russia or Iran or Venezuela was instead an indictment of U.S. behavior in the world.

The world has changed but American administrations don’t. They continue behaving as if the U.S. is still the all-powerful hegemon that will always get what it wants. It does have the world’s reserve currency and the biggest military, but it can’t control the world without doing harm to itself and its allies. The United States cynically used the United Nations to call for a “no fly zone” over Libya, which allowed it to destroy that nation. Partnerships with jihadists brought destruction to Libya and to Syria, causing a humanitarian disaster which displaced millions of people. The 2014 coup against the elected government of Ukraine has turned into all out war. The sanctions targeting Russian gas and oil have raised prices all over the world and damaged European economies more than any others. The ruble has risen in value and the euro has declined. Even hegemons don’t always get their way.

While Biden mouthed platitudes and falsehoods at the United Nations, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov met with representatives from China, Cuba, Eritrea, Serbia, Laos, Jordan, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Algeria, Burkina Faso, India, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Mexico among others. So much for Washington’s claims that Russia is an isolated pariah.

While Washington rails against Moscow, it continues to ignore UN votes to end sanctions against Cuba. This year Cuba will again submit a resolution calling on the U.S. to end its trade embargo. During the 2021 vote only the U.S. and Israel voted no. The next vote will have the same result, and reveal Biden’s words, “The United States will always promote human rights and the values enshrined in the U.N. Charter in our own country and around the world,” as a sham.

The United Nations is in serious need of reform. It is part of the Core Group which chooses presidents for Haiti and acts against the will of its people. Biden mentioned Haiti in passing and called for an end to gang violence. But that violence is the direct result of U.S. interventions there. The 75-year history of allowing the permanent Security Council members to dictate to the rest of the world should change. But who should do the changing? Not the U.S., which always has ulterior motives and dirty hands.

Biden did make one valid statement. “Because if nations can pursue their imperial ambitions without consequences, then we put at risk everything this very institution stands for.” It is unfortunate that the U.S. ignores the consequences of its own actions.

The U.S. Proxy War In Ukraine: How the Past Became the Present

By John Bellamy Foster

The following is the text of a presentation by John Bellamy Foster given on March 31, 2022 to the advisory board of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Thanks for inviting me to make this presentation. In talking about the Ukraine war, the essential thing to recognize at the outset is that this is a proxy war. In this regard, none other than Leon Panetta, who was CIA director and then secretary of defense under the Barack Obama administration, acknowledged recently that the war in Ukraine is a U.S. “proxy war,” though seldom admitted. To be explicit, the United States (backed by the whole of NATO) is in a long proxy war with Russia, with Ukraine as the battlefield. The U.S. role in this conception, as Panetta insisted, is to provide more and more weapons faster and faster with Ukraine doing the fighting, bolstered by foreign mercenaries.

So how did this proxy war come about? In order to understand that we have to look at the U.S. imperial grand strategy. Here we have to go back to 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved or even further to the 1980s. There are two prongs to this imperial grand strategy, one as geopolitical expansion and positioning, including the enlargement of NATO, the other as the U.S. drive for nuclear primacy. A third prong involves the economy but won’t be considered here.

The First Prong: Geopolitical Expansion

The first prong was enunciated in Paul Wolfowitz’s Defense Policy Guideline for the United States in February 1992, just months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The grand imperial strategy adopted at the time and followed ever since had to do with the United States advancing geopolitically into the terrain of the former Soviet Union as well as what had been the Soviet sphere of influence. The idea was to prevent Russia from reemerging as a great power. This process of U.S./NATO geopolitical expansion commenced immediately, visible in all the U.S./NATO wars in Asia, Africa, and Europe that have taken place in the last three decades. NATO’s war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s was particularly important in this respect. Even while the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was going on, the United States began the process of enlarging NATO by moving it further and further East to encompass all of the former Warsaw Pact countries as well as parts of the former USSR. Bill Clinton in his 1996 election campaign made the enlargement of NATO part of his platform. Washington started to implement that in 1997, eventually adding 15 additional countries to NATO doubling its size and creating a 30-nation Atlantic Alliance targeting Russia, while also giving NATO a more global interventionist role, as in Yugoslavia, Syria, and Libya.

But the goal was the Ukraine. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the most important strategist of all of this and had been Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor said in his 1997 Grand Chessboard that Ukraine was the “geopolitical pivot,” particularly in the West, which if it were brought into NATO and under Western control, would weaken Russia so much that it could be tethered, if not dismembered. This has been the goal all along and U.S. strategic planners and Washington officials, along with the NATO allies, have stated over and over that they wanted to bring the Ukraine into NATO. NATO made this goal official in 2008. Only a few months ago, in November 2021 in the new strategic charter between the Biden administration in Washington and Zelensky government in Kyiv, it was agreed that the immediate aim was bring Ukraine into NATO. But this has also been NATO’s policy for a long time now. The United States in the final months of 2021 and at the beginning of 2022 was moving very fast to militarize the Ukraine and accomplish that as a fait accompli.

The idea, articulated by Brzezinski and others, was that once the Ukraine was secured for NATO, Russia was finished, the proximity to Moscow with Ukraine as the thirty-first nation in the NATO alliance, would give NATO a 1200-mile border with Russia, the same path through which Hitler’s armies had invaded the Soviet Union, but in this case with Russia facing the world’s greatest nuclear alliance. This would change the entire geopolitical map giving the West control of Eurasia west of China.

How this actually played out is important. The proxy war started in 2014 when the Maidan coup, engineered by the United States, took place in Ukraine, removing the democratically elected president, and putting ultra-nationalists largely in control. The immediate result though was that Ukraine began to break apart. Crimea had been an independent, autonomous state from 1991 to 1995. In 1995 Ukraine illegally tore up the Crimean Constitution and annexed it against its will. The Crimean people didn’t consider themselves part of Ukraine, and were largely Russian speaking, with deep cultural connections to Russia. When the coup occurred, with Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in control, the Crimean population wanted out. Russia gave them an opportunity with a referendum to stay in the Ukraine or join with Russia. They chose the latter. However, in the eastern Ukraine the primarily Russian population was subjected to repression by ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi Kyiv forces. Russophobia and extreme repression of the Russian-speaking populations in the East set in—with the infamous case of the forty people blown up in a public building by neo-Nazis associated with the Azov Battalion. Originally there were a number of breakaway republics. Two survived in the Donbass region, with dominant Russian-speaking populations: the republics of Luhansk and Donetsk.

A civil war thus emerged in Ukraine between Kyiv in the West and Donbass in the East. But it was also a proxy war with the U.S./NATO supporting Kyiv and Russia supporting Donbass. The civil war started right after the coup, when the Russian language was basically outlawed, so that individuals could get fined for speaking Russian in a store. It was an attack on the Russian language and culture and a violent repression of the populations in the eastern parts of the Ukraine.

Initially, there were about 14,000 lives lost in the civil war. And these casualties were in the eastern part of the country, with something like 2.5 million refugees pouring into Russia. The Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015 led to a ceasefire, mediated by France and Germany, and supported by the United Nations Security Council. In these agreements the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics were given autonomous status within Ukraine. But Kyiv broke the Minsk agreements again and again, continuing to attack the breakaway republics in Donbass, though on a reduced scale, and the US continued to provide stepped-up military training and weapons.

Washington provided an enormous amount of military support to Kyiv between 1991 and 2021. The direct military aid to Kiev from the United States was $3.8 billion from 1991 to 2014. From 2014 to 2021, it was $2.4 billion, increasing in rate, and then finally skyrocketing once Joe Biden came into office in Washington. The United States was militarizing the Ukraine very fast. The United Kingdom and the Canada trained around 50,000 Ukrainian troops, not counting those trained by the United States. The CIA actually trained the Azov Battalion and the rightwing paramilitaries. All of this was targeting Russia.

The Russians were concerned particularly about the nuclear aspect, since NATO is a nuclear alliance, and if Ukraine was brought into NATO and missiles were placed in Ukraine, a nuclear strike could occur before the Kremlin had time to respond. Already there are anti-ballistic missile defense facilities in Poland and Romania, crucial as counterforce weapons in a NATO first strike. Yet, it is important to understand that the Aegis missile defense systems placed there are also capable of launching nuclear offensive missiles. All of this factored into Russia’s entry into the Ukrainian civil war. In February 2022 Kyiv was preparing a major offensive, with 130,000 troops on the borders of Donbass in the East and South, with U.S./NATO, firing into Donbass, with continuing U.S./NATO support. This crossed Moscow’s clearly articulated red lines. In response, Russia first declared that the Minsk Agreements had failed and that the Donbass republics had to be regarded as independent and autonomous states. It then intervened in the Ukrainian civil war on the side of Donbass, and in line with what it considered its own national defense.

The result is a proxy war between the U.S./NATO and Russia being fought in Ukraine, developing out of a civil war in Ukraine itself, which had its inception in a U.S.-engineered coup. But unlike other proxy wars between capitalist states this one is occurring on the borders of one of the great nuclear powers and is brought on by the long-articulated grand imperial strategy in Washington aimed at capturing the Ukraine for NATO in order to destroy Russia as a great power, and establish, as Brzezinski stated, U.S. supremacy over the globe. Obviously, this particular proxy war carries grave dangers on a level not seen since the Cuban missile crisis. Following the Russian offensive, France declared that NATO was a nuclear power and immediately afterwards, on February 27, the Russians put their nuclear forces on high alert.

Another thing to understand about the proxy war is that the Russians have been trying to with considerable success to avoid civilian casualties. The populations of Russia and Ukraine are interwoven, and Moscow has attempted to keep civilian casualties down. Figures in the US military and in the European militaries have been indicating that the civilian casualties are remarkably low, when compared to the standard of U.S. warfare. One indication of this is that the military casualties to the Russian troops are greater than the civilian casualties of Ukrainians, which is the reverse of the way it works in U.S. warfare. If you look at how the United States fights a war, as in Iraq, it attacks the electrical and water facilities and the entire civilian infrastructure on the grounds that this will create dissension in the population and a revolt against the government. But targeting civilian infrastructure naturally increases civilian casualties, as in Iraq where the civilian casualties from the U.S. invasion were in the hundreds of thousands. Russia, in contrast, has not sought to destroy the civilian infrastructure, which it would be easy for them to do. Even in the midst of the war they are still selling natural gas to the Kyiv, fulfilling their contracts. They have not destroyed Ukraine’s Internet.

Russia intervened mainly with the object of freeing up Donbass, much of which was occupied by Kyiv forces. A priority has been gaining control of Mariupol, the main port, which would make Donbass viable. Mariupol has been occupied by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion. The Azov battalion now controls less than 20% of the city. They are hiding out in the old Soviet bunkers in part of the city. The Donetsk People’s Militia and the Russians control the rest of it. There are about 100,000 paramilitary forces in Ukraine. Most of the paramilitaries within the Ukrainian forces that constituted the larger part of the 130,000 troops that were surrounding Donbass, have now been cut off by the Russian military. Besides gaining control of Donbass together with the people’s militias, Moscow seeks to compel the Ukraine to demilitarize and to accept a neutral status, remaining outside of NATO.

If you look at the situation from the standpoint of the peace agreements—and the Global Times had a good report on it on March 31—you can see what the war is all about. Kyiv has provisionally agreed to neutrality, to be overseen by certain guarantors from the West, such as Canada. But the sticking point in the negotiations is what Kyiv calls “sovereignty.” That is all about Donbass and the civil war. Ukraine insists that Donbass is part of its sovereign territory, irrespective of the wishes of the population in the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The people in the Donbass republics and the Russians can’t accept that. In fact, the peoples’ militias and the Russians are still working at liberating parts of Donbass that are occupied by these paramilitary forces. It is there that the main sticking point in the negotiations lies, and this goes back to the reality of the civil war in Ukraine. The U.S. role in this has been to operate as a spoiler in the negotiations.

The Second Prong: The Drive to Nuclear Primacy

Here it is necessary to turn to the second prong of the U.S. Imperial Strategy. So far, I have discussed the grand imperial strategy in terms of geopolitics, the expansion into the territory of the former Soviet Union and the Soviet sphere of influence, which was articulated most effectively by Brzezinski. But there’s another prong to the U.S. grand imperial strategy that needs to be discussed in this context, and that is the drive to new nuclear primacy. If you read Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard, his book on U.S. geopolitical strategy, you won’t find a word on nuclear weapons. The word nuclear doesn’t appear at all in his book, I believe. Yet this is of course crucial to the overall U.S. strategy with respect to Russia. In 1979, under Jimmy Carter, while Brzezinski was his national security advisor, it was decided to move beyond Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and for the United States to pursue a counterforce strategy of nuclear primacy. This involved placing nuclear missiles in Europe. In his “A Letter to America,” which appears in Protest and Survive published by Monthly Review Press in 1981, Marxist historian and anti-nuclear activist E.P. Thompson actually quotes Brzezinski admitting that the U.S. strategy had shifted to a counterforce war.

To explain this, it is necessary to go back a little bit further. By the 1960s, the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States. There was a big debate within the Pentagon and security establishment about this, because nuclear parity meant MAD. It meant Mutually Assured Destruction. And whichever nation, it didn’t matter which, attacked the other, both would be utterly destroyed. Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defense, started promoting the notion of counterforce to get around MAD. Essentially, there are two types of nuclear attacks. One is a countervalue which targets the cities, the population, and the economy of the adversary. That’s what MAD is based on. The other kind of attack is a counterforce war aimed at destroying the enemy’s nuclear forces before they can be launched. And, of course, a counterforce strategy is the same thing as a first strike strategy. The United States under McNamara, started to explore counterforce. McNamara then decided was such an approach was insane, and he decided to make MAD the deterrence policy of the United States. That lasted through most of the 1960s and seventies. But in 1979, in the Carter administration, when Brzezinski was the national security adviser, they decided to implement a counterforce strategy. The United States at that time decided to locate Pershing II missiles and nuclear-armed cruise missiles in Europe. That led to the rise of the European Nuclear Disarmament movement, the great European peace movement.

Washington initially put Pershing II intermediate nuclear missiles, as well as cruise missiles, in Europe. This became a huge issue for the peace movement in both Europe and the United States. The dangers of a nuclear war were enormously enhanced. The Ronald Reagan administration heavily promoted the counterforce strategy and added their sci-fi Strategic Defense Initiative (better known by its nickname of Star Wars), which envisioned a system that would shoot down all of the enemy missiles altogether. This was largely a fantasy. Eventually, the nuclear arms race in this period was stopped as a result of the massive peace movements in Europe on both sides of the Berlin Wall and the nuclear freeze movement in the United States, as well as the rise of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. But after the dissolution of the USSR, Washington decided to go forward with the counterforce strategy, its drive towards nuclear primacy.

Over the next three decades, Washington kept on developing counterforce weapons and strategies, enhancing US abilities in that respect, to the point that in 2006 it was declared that the United States was near nuclear primacy, as explained at the time in Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, the main center for U.S. grand strategy. The Foreign Affairs article declared that China didn’t have a nuclear deterrent against a U.S. first strike, given the improvements in U.S. targeting and sensing technology, and that even the Russians couldn’t count on the survivability their nuclear deterrent anymore. Washington was pushing forward to achieve complete nuclear primacy. This went hand in hand with the enlargement of NATO in Europe because part of the counterforce strategy was to get counterforce weapons closer and closer to Russia to decrease the time with which Moscow could respond.

Russia was the primary target in the strategy. While China was clearly intended to be the later target.  But Trump coming in decided to pursue detente with Russia and concentrate on China. That threw things off for a while, destabilizing the U.S./NATO grand strategy since the enlargement of NATO was an essential part of the nuclear primacy strategy. Once the Biden administration came into office, attempts were made to make up for lost time in tightening the Ukraine noose in Russia.

In all of this, the Russians, now a capitalist state and regaining great power status, were not fooled. They saw this coming. In 2007 Vladimir Putin declared that the unipolar world was impossible, that the United States wouldn’t be able to achieve nuclear primacy. Both Russia and China started to develop weapons that would get around the counterforce, strategy of the United States. The idea of a first strike is that the attacker—and only the United States has anything near this capability—strikes the land-based missiles, whether in hardened silos or mobile, and by tracking the submarines is in a position to eliminate them as well. The role of anti-ballistic missile systems is then to pick off whatever retaliatory strike remains. Naturally, the other side, namely Russia and China among the great nuclear powers, know all of this, so they do everything they can to protect their nuclear deterrent or retaliatory strike capability. In the last few years Russia and China developed hypersonic missiles. These missiles move extraordinarily fast, above Mach 5 and at the same time are maneuverable, so they cannot be stopped by anti-ballistic missile systems, weakening the U.S. counterforce capability. The United States itself has not yet developed hypersonic missile technologies of this kind. This type of weapon is what China calls an “assassin’s mace,” meaning that it can be used by a lesser power to counter an overwhelming advantage in the military power of the opponent. This then increases the basic deterrent of Russia and China by protecting their retaliatory capabilities in the event of a first strike against them. It is one of the major factors that that is countering U.S. first strike capabilities.

Another aspect in this game of nuclear chicken is the U.S./NATO dominance in satellites. It is largely because of this that Pentagon targeting is now so accurate that they can conceive of the possibility of destroying the hardened missile silos with smaller warheads because of the absolute accuracy of their targeting, while also targeting submarines. All of this has to do with the satellite systems. This gives the United States, it is widely believed, the capability of destroying hardened missile silos or at least command and control centers with weapons that aren’t nuclear, or with smaller nuclear warheads, because of the increased accuracy. The Russian and Chinese militaries have been focusing therefore a lot on anti-satellite weapons in order to take this advantage away.

Nuclear Winter and Omnicide

All of this may sound bad enough, but it is necessary to say something about nuclear winter. The U.S. military—and I imagine it’s true of the Russian military as well—have, if you read their declassified documents, completely walked away from the science on nuclear war. In the declassified document on nuclear armaments and nuclear war there is no mention of firestorms anywhere in the discussion of nuclear war. But firestorms are actually what result in the largest number of deaths in a nuclear attack. The firestorms can spread out in a thermonuclear attack on a city to as much as 150 square miles. The military establishments, which are all about fighting and prevailing in a nuclear war, leave the firestorms out of account in their analyses even in calculations of MAD. But there is another reason for this as well since the firestorms are what generate nuclear winter.

In 1983, when counterforce weapons were being placed in Europe, Soviet and American atmospheric scientists, working together, created the first models of nuclear winter. A number of the key scientists, in both the Soviet Union and the United States, were involved in climate change research, which is essentially the inverse of nuclear winter, though not nearly as abrupt. These scientists discovered that in a nuclear war with firestorms in 100 cities, the effect would be a drop in an average global temperature by what Carl Sagan said at the time was up to “several tens of degrees” Celsius. They later backed off from that with further studies and said it was that the drop would be up to twenty degrees Celsius. But you can imagine what that means. The firestorms would loft the soot and the smoke into the stratosphere. This would block to 70% of the solar energy reaching the earth, which would mean all harvests on Earth would end. This would destroy nearly all vegetative life, so that the direct nuclear effects in the northern hemisphere would be accompanied by the death of almost everyone in the southern hemisphere as well. Only a few people would survive on the planet.

The nuclear winter studies were criticized by the military and by the establishment in the United States, as exaggerated. But in the 21st century, beginning in 2007, the nuclear winter studies were expanded, replicated, and validated numerous times. They showed that even in a war between India and Pakistan using Hiroshima-level atomic bombs, the result would a nuclear winter not as severe, but with the effect of reducing the solar energy reaching the planet enough to kill billions of people. In contrast, in a global thermonuclear war, as the news studies have shown, nuclear winter would be even would be as bad or worse as what the original studies in 1980s had determined. And this is the science. It’s accepted in the top peer-reviewed scientific publications and the findings have been repeatedly validated. It is very clear in terms of the science that if we have a global thermonuclear exchange, it will kill off the entire population of the earth with maybe a few remnants of the human species surviving somewhere in the southern hemisphere. The result will be planetary omnicide

At first McNamara thought that counterforce was a good idea, because it was seen as a No Cities strategy. The United States could just destroy the nuclear weapons on the other side and leave the cities untouched. But that quickly dissolved, and nobody believes that anymore because most the command-and-control centers are in or near the cities. There’s no way that these can all be destroyed in a first strike without attacking the cities. Moreover, there’s no way that the nuclear deterrent on the other side can be completely destroyed, where the major nuclear powers are concerned, and only a relatively small part of the nuclear arsenals of the major powers can destroy all the major cities on the other side. To think otherwise is to pursue a dangerous fantasy that increases the chance of a global thermonuclear war that will destroy humanity. This means that the major nuclear analysts, who are deeply engaged in counterforce doctrines, are promoting total madness. The nuclear war planners pretend that they can prevail in a nuclear war. Yet, we now know that MAD, mutually assured destruction, as it was originally envisioned, is less extreme than what a global thermonuclear war means today. Mutually assured destruction meant both sides were destroyed in their hundreds of millions. But nuclear winter means virtually the entire population of the planet is eliminated.

Counterforce strategy, the drive towards first strike capability or nuclear primacy means that the nuclear arms race keeps on increasing in the hope of eluding MAD, while actually threatening human extinction. Even if the numbers of nuclear weapons are limited, the so-called “modernization” of the nuclear arsenal, particularly on the U.S. side, is designed to make counterforce and thus a first strike thinkable. That’s why Washington withdrew from the nuclear treaties like the ABM Treaty and the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty. These were seen as blocking counterforce weapons, interfering with the Pentagon’s drive to nuclear primacy. Washington walked out of all of those treaties and then while it was willing to accept a limit on the total number of nuclear weapons because the game was then being played in a different way. The U.S. strategy is focused on counterforce not countervalue now.

All of this is a lot to be absorbed in a short time. But I think it’s important to understand the two prongs of the U.S./NATO imperial grand strategy in order to understand why the Kremlin considers itself threatened, and why it acted as it did, and why this proxy war is so dangerous for the world as a whole. What we should keep in mind right now is that all of this maneuvering for absolute world supremacy has brought to us to the brink of a global thermonuclear war and global omnicide. The only answer is to create a massive world movement for peace, ecology, and socialism.

John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, is editor of Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine published monthly in New York City. His research is devoted to critical inquiries into theory and history, focusing primarily on the economic, political and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also encompassing the wider realm of social theory as a whole. He has published numerous articles and books focusing on the political economy of capitalism and the economic crisis, ecology and the ecological crisis, and Marxist theory: (with Brett Clark) The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift; The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology; (with Paul Burkett) Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (2016); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014); (with Robert W. McChesney) The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (2012); (with Fred Magdoff) What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (2011); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (2009); (with Fred Magdoff) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (2009); The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (2009); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (2008); Ecology Against Capitalism (2002); Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000); (with Frederick H. Buttel and Fred Magdoff) Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (2000); The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment (1999); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert W. McChesney) Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (1998); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood) In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (1997); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (1986); (with Henryk Szlajfer) The Faltering Economy: The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capitalism (1984). His work is published in at least twenty-five languages. Visit johnbellamyfoster.org for a collection of most of Foster's works currently available online.

CONIFA - The Guerrilla Alternative

[Pictured: Barawa celebrate scoring against Tamil Eelam in the CONIFA World Football Cup (Courtesy of Con Chronis/CONIFA)]

By Brendan S.

Taking a look at the connection between politics and football, one may find that just beyond the immediate realm of international political power, there is international sports. A normative conductor often playing a direly underestimated role in connecting civil society and the general population to political phenomena. With the existence of a national team on an international stage, soft power runs wild and unleashed for the nation or state it represents. Whether it be diplomacy of internationally recognized actors or unrecognized actors, relations between states, nations, and actors in all levels of society can be shaped and shifted when the interests of many of the world’s actors are all brought together in a stadium. However, the most popular international sports organizations such as the Olympics and FIFA often only cater to the world’s ruling classes, accepting only national teams from states which are internationally recognized. Some sports organizations outside of the mainstream have emerged from this dilemma, created with the purpose of including teams from nations and regions that are unrecognized. These organizations shall be referred to as ‘guerrilla sports organizations,’ alluding to their radical and parallel nature. In football, the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, or CONIFA, holds a very important stake in the world of unrecognized international sports competition.

Channels of Sports Hegemony

In many international sports organizations where national teams compete, there is a rather blatant common factor which can be observed virtually across the board. That factor is, the exclusive participation of internationally recognized nation-states and their dependent territories. In football, the two most anticipated international competitions are the Olympics and FIFA. Taking a look at the member national teams of both organizations, there is scarcely a single nation represented that holds partial or no international recognition. Behold Article 30 of the Olympic Charter:

“1. In the Olympic Charter, the expression ‘country’ means an independent State recognised by the international community.

2. The name of an NOC (Natl. Olympic Committee) must reflect the territorial extent and tradition of its country and shall be subject to the approval of the IOC (Intl. Olympic Committee) Executive Board” (Intl. Olympic Committee).

Now, behold Statute 11 of the FIFA Statutes: “An association in a region which has not yet gained independence may, with the authorisation of the member association in the country on which it is dependent, also apply for admission to FIFA.” (FIFA)

It is explicitly mentioned in both the Olympics and FIFA guidelines that in order to have national team membership, the national team must either represent an internationally recognized state or be a dependent territory which gets permission from the ruling state’s team. For example, the Faroe Islands national football team is a FIFA member because it has been granted permission by the Denmark national football team. However, Tamil Eelam national football team is not a member association because it has not been granted permission from the Sri Lanka national football team to join FIFA.

To understand the reasons for why this culturally-hegemonic dynamic is codified, one needs to find how the organizations in question interpret a nation and a state. According to German sociologist Gunther Teubner, a nation-state is distinguished by the “collective identity of a social system.” (Duval, 248). According to his understanding, the nation is inherently attached to the state, and thus there cannot be more than one nation within a state. This understanding of the nation and the state is widely accepted in liberal and realist theory. However, the term ‘nation’ shall be defined in this paper from a less dehumanizing lens, as a group of people with a distinct identity and homeland, regardless of the internationally recognized nation-state they live within the borders of.

So, how exactly are a nation and a state interpreted from the lens of the Olympics and FIFA? Reading the guidelines, it appears they interpret them in a near identical manner to Teubner’s definition, hoping to avert as much condemnation from the hegemonies of internationally recognized states as possible. To the Olympics and FIFA, there is no difference between a nation and a state. The nation-state is a collective identity, even when its borders may make little sense, and even when there are multiple nations within a state, all deserving of self-determination; even when said nations are oppressed under the ruling class of the hegemony nation. Like water, both organizations follow the easiest path of least resistance---to powerful ruling classes. This path is rather obviously quite unethical, dehumanizing groups across the world who fight for their self-determination within nation-states that oppress them and certainly do not represent their identity. Following this interpretation of the state, Olympic and FIFA law intend to intersect with the accepted hegemonic laws of internationally recognized states whenever possible. With the complete absence of sub-state interests, states take advantage of this dynamic to make international sports a culturally hegemonic phenomenon. (Mestre, 101)

Observing the diplomatic significance of FIFA and the Olympics with this in mind, the two organizations have been utilized by states to exercise soft power in what is deemed ‘mega-events literature.’ In essence, mega-events literature is the language of ruling classes in conveying their state’s prestige to the world during international competitions, and also a tool for ruling classes to communicate with other states in building relations. In other words, it is a form of soft power whereby the state utilizes the national team to appear competent and insubordinate to other powers on the world stage, but also a method of diplomacy. Mega-events literature is unique in that it almost solely utilizes international sports competitions such as the Olympics and FIFA. While it can consolidate a global perception of power for large states, it can also be a beneficial tool for small states in acting as a direct funnel for soft power and diplomacy. For instance, the lack of attention that Tuvalu or Bhutan are plagued with in international political institutions such as the United Nations can be at least partially made up for via mega-events literature, where they have equal opportunity to make their prestige and diplomacy recognized through international competition (Grix, 17).

However, a dilemma presents itself in the ‘mega-events’ portion of ‘mega-events literature,’ making a full circle back to the Olympics and FIFA interpretation of the nation and the state. Mega-events literature, while benefiting (or harming) ties between states through soft power, structurally excludes marginalized interests, such as that of unrecognized nations within states. In this, mega-events literature reinforces the international legitimacy of oppressive ruling classes across the world. The nation-state national team is inherently projected as a collective entity, where the existence of self-determination among marginalized groups is completely dependent on whether the ruling class allows for it. Uncritical of the nation-state status quo, international competitions can thus be indirectly abused by those in power. Any soft power gained from the international competition can be diverted inward, against marginalized groups.

A Response to Sports Hegemony

Enter CONIFA (Confederation of Independent Football Associations), an international guerrilla football organization with national teams representing 166 million people in unrecognized nations across the world (Rookwood, 8). While players with backgrounds in unrecognized nations can switch between member associations in FIFA that represent internationally recognized states, they cannot play for their actual home nation, since it is unrecognized. They can, however, transfer to CONIFA, which is likely to have their home nation as a member association (Nance). Established in 2013 to consolidate preceding guerrilla football organizations, CONIFA is the first international guerrilla sports organization to holistically represent any and all unrecognized nations which desire to have a national football team, from Tamil Eelam to Tibet. With frequent matches across the world, the league holds a world championship every two years, consisting of teams which have won their respective continental championships. CONIFA’s four primary principles are to: “(1) strengthen people, (2) strengthen identity of people, for nations, minorities, and isolated territories, (3) respect differences, (4) contribute to world peace” (Utomo, 27).

While mega-events literature holds traditional diplomacy, or “the practice of intermediary service on behalf of a sovereign state in relation to other sovereign states under international law,” CONIFA breeds two forms of diplomacy which are generally separate from the recognized international system (Ganohariti and Dijxhoorn, 331). Mega-events literature is replaced by the sub-state modes of diplomacy: protodiplomacy and paradiplomacy. While some scholars claim the two terms are interchangeable, there appears to be a clear nuance in their usage. As defined by Ramesh Ganohariti and Ernst Dijxhoorn, protodiplomacy is “efforts to promote claims of political independence or autonomy by a people or political subunit,” while paradiplomacy is understood as “the involvement of subnational government external affairs in international relations,” whether by interaction with recognized or unrecognized entities. These definitions are generally accepted among scholars (Ganohariti and Dijxhoorn, 333)(Utomo, 30). In the words of scholar Ario Utomo: “Horizontally, CONIFA has the ability to become a supra-structure for the members to communicate and build a sense of intersubjectivity among each other. Vertically, CONIFA is benefitted by their specific focus so that they can help the members project the ‘sports countries’ image which might develop the members’ diplomatic statures” (Utomo, 33). The horizontal illustration explains paradiplomacy, while the vertical illustration explains protodiplomacy. With these distinctive diplomatic powers offered with membership in CONIFA, unrecognized nations are granted a platform to seek relations and support one another in their common fight against state cultural hegemony and ‘collective identity.’

In an example of protodiplomacy in CONIFA, the confederation utilizes high-profile sponsorships to the benefit of international attention toward the national teams, which in turn funnel toward the unrecognized nation it represents. For example, Irish betting firm Paddy Power is a major sponsor, creating a link from the national teams directly into civil society. In a more direct example of the organization’s protodiplomacy, CONIFA founded a youth exchange in 2013 intended to promote intercultural communication and educating, with a ‘cultural village’ that contains presentations, discussions, and exhibitions from representatives of the national teams (Utomo, 28). While this youth exchange is aimed at providing the unrecognized nations a chance to promote their self-determination, the national teams intermingle and improve relations with one another as they hold meaningful dialogue.

Another instance of CONIFA protodiplomacy uniting unrecognized nations was the 2016 championship, eagerly hosted by Abkhazia. To Abkhazia’s surprise, the Kabylian national team closely befriended the Abkhazian national team following their match. According to an observer during the last event, “the Kabylians sat on the roof…and watched the final in the rain with their new Abkhazian friends. The flags of both nations fluttered side by side in the wet breeze, a fraternity forged on the football field, immortalized by circumstances.”  This subsequently led to increased ties between Abkhazian and Kabylian civil societies aided by the newfound popular support of friendship between the two nations (Martyn-Hemphill, Ganohariti and Dijxhoorn 345).

Paradiplomacy in CONIFA, on the other hand, often more discreetly takes the form of direct dialogue between self-determination struggles. For instance, when the Mapuche and Aymara national teams (both Chilean indigenous groups) have met in matches, they display mutual solidarity in their common struggle against the oppressive policies of the Chilean state. Diplomatic dialogue can take place between the two communities’ representatives who are brought along to sustain relations between the Mapuche and Aymara struggles that would otherwise be difficult to attain under Chilean state surveillance. If the Mapuche or Aymara national teams were to face the Rapa Nui national team in the future, which is likely to occur, it would be another opportunity for paradiplomacy in solidarity against the Chilean state, which is rather difficult to otherwise achieve in-person as the Rapa Nui live 2,300 miles off the coast of the Chilean mainland (Jockel). Even if representatives of the movements are not available or prohibited in a venue, any communication which takes place can be relayed back to the movements and communities. As the matches often take place outside of the jurisdiction of the state hegemonies in question, CONIFA is a floating transnational refuge of unifying paradiplomacy between unrecognized nations, and recognized states can hardly do anything about it.

In the strange case of Chile, the Chilean Sports Ministry has actually funded the matches between indigenous nations in an attempt to make the Chilean state appear pro-indigenous (Jockel). Not all teams have enjoyed this unexpected sponsorship of states, however. The Sri Lankan state has banned the Tamil Eelam national team from entering the country, the Algerian state has sent threats to the families of the Kabylia national team, the Chinese state has blackmailed sponsors of the Tibetan national team, and the Ukrainian state has adamantly accused the Karpatalya national team of “sporting separatism” (Martyn-Hemphill, Utomo, 29).

While the unique perks of proto and paradiplomacy have helped unite national teams of unrecognized nations, one could argue, however, that CONIFA in fact sews more hatred than cooperation between struggles of self-determination. The Northern Cyprus national team’s behavior can be cited as an example of this. Since 2006, the Northern Cyprus national team, under pressure from the Northern Cyprus government, has attempted to bar various national teams from playing in its arenas on the basis of ethnic strife (Menary). However, CONIFA and its predecessor organizations cracked down on this behavior by stripping it of hosting world cups. One of CONIFA’s many commitments, according to the organization, is “fair play and the eradication of racism” (Rookwood, 8). Generally, associations which oppose each other on the basis of ethnic strife simply do not communicate nor play one another, and the confederation strictly prevents associations from coercing others in any way. In the cases they do play each other, while football matches between bitterly opposed nations may be particularly competitive, there is no material action of diplomacy which harms relations any further.

All in all, when observing the subsurface dynamic of the most prominent international guerrilla football organization in the world, it becomes evident that CONIFA is simple football on the surface level, but more importantly a source of sub-state diplomacy for unrecognized nations which yearn to seek ties with other movements or promote their own self-determination struggles. Certainly, the competition of football does not detract from the relations which already exist, but rather brings together the representatives of each unrecognized nation who seek solidarity in a somewhat nascent arena of proto and paradiplomacy. While the Olympics and FIFA only allow the membership of internationally recognized nation-states, refusing to separate the nation from the state in their official understanding, CONIFA has emerged to solve this problem, representing a myriad of unrecognized nations across the world while providing them the added perks of diplomacy that would otherwise be illegal. Through CONIFA, the guerrilla alternative, unrecognized nations have found a new forum of unprecedented unity and cooperation.

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Afghanistan, Western Imperialism, and the Great Game of Smashing Countries

By John Pilger

Republished from Mint Press News.

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal  reported that “150,000 persons… marched to honour the new flag… the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked… We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday… it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning… these were the people the West supported.

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet-backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs:

We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré  and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government. This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it… Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York–within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests… would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly. The U.S. was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by warlords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me,

We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know….

In 1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898,

upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11.

The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

On Afghanistan, he added this:

We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office:

The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering…

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a U.S. oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the U.S. and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

Fascism and the Politics of the Past

By Yanis Iqbal

Fascist groupings are in the ascendant throughout the world. While some are emerging from the political peripheries - slowly but steadily gaining traction on the terrain of ideological hegemony - some have already taken the reins of state power. This new wave of fascism poses an important question: why did the intensifying crisis of neoliberalism strengthen the Right instead of revitalizing the Left? The post-1990s trajectory of austerity and immiseration should have bolstered the appeal of progressive forces among the masses. However, what we have been witnessing is the growing hold of extremely conservative ideas on the proletariat.

Non-synchronicity

Ernst Bloch, a German Marxist philosopher, witnessed a similar situation as the left-wing camp in his country was trounced by Nazism. His response to this contradictory development resonates with the current conjuncture. Bloch deployed the concept of “non-synchronicity” to understand fascism, writing, “Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others”. There are social strata that have been left behind in the process of modernization. These layers express their dissatisfaction with the present by looking back, towards a better past.

In other words, fascism draws from the future in the past, calling up mythologized forces, responding to modern disenchantment, joining a romantic anti-capitalism - roots, soil, homeland - among rural strata with fears of decline and genuine impoverishment among middling urban strata and a youth out of step with the capitalist drive toward abstraction and immateriality. Fascism, therefore, expresses an authentic longing for something different. It creates new figures, synthesizing various elements into hybrid structures, using materials from elsewhere - fairytales, myth, kitsch, Romanticism, occultism and magic, masculine qualities (strength, openness, decency, purity), as well as vitalist philosophy (will, life, creation, instinctive knowledge).

The palingenetic ideals of fascism serve transhistorically as a medium for processing every historical present. The subjects of fascism are called upon to leave a shameful normal life and to enter a proud life of bravery. It is important to note that pride and shame are fundamentally related. Feeling pride involves a realization of the ideals that define the faults and errors that cause us to feel ashamed. Shame collapses the “I” with the “we” in the failure to transform the social ideal into action, a failure which, when witnessed, confirms the ideal, and makes possible a return to pride. In the fascist case, the return to pride depends on the positioning of the subject as someone who confesses to being part of the imminent chaos and decline. Thus, the enactment of shame functions as a means of returning to pride. This return involves correcting wrongdoings by defending the survival of the nation, the people and the race.

Destroying Public Discourse

Fascism’s nostalgic idealizations are always empty. And yet, we know that the emptiness of the mythically constructed past that the Right holds out as a lost version of a better life as well as the emptiness of its promises with regard to the contradictions of capitalism are precisely the point of the underlying strategy. Empty times and spaces are effective spaces for the creation of the fears, fantasies, and hopes that the Right seeks to cultivate. Vague references to a better past ask the audience to fill in the gaps in content and logic with their own nonsynchronous projections; a rhetorical model of broad strokes, vague slogans, provocations, and propositions clearly replaced articulated programs. The point is not precision or the communication of actual information but the establishment of spaces in which anomy and anxiety can play themselves out and which can amplify discontent rather than finding answers to it.

The invocation of historically indeterminate imageries has real consequences for electoral battles and discursive struggles. Eberhard Knödler-Bunte argues that the entanglement of fascist ideology in the past turns it into a “depoliticized mass movement.” The “fascist public sphere,” Knödler-Bunte contends, is ultimately nothing other than “a politicized public sphere aimed at real depoliticization.” Hence, fascism operates on an innately contradictory ground - establishing a public sphere that encourages politicization while simultaneously reducing political dialogue and thought to impoverished versions of public deliberation.

Knödler-Bunte’s arguments help us understand the strategy of contemporary right-wing governments that lower the bar of public and political discourse in order to replace political dialogue with emotionally charged slogans. Paired with the mere semblance of rebelliousness, these tactics obfuscate structural problems and promote a depoliticized discourse, including pseudo-political branding efforts, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy narratives, in place of political analysis, debate, and programmatic thinking. The extreme Right has traditionally relied on this co-optation of revolutionary energy and its displacement from a critique of capitalism to a vehement yearning for a hazy past.

Liberatory History

Fascism has a constitutive contradiction: the rising tensions between the ironclad rhythms of the working day and the promise of a magical rupture with these empty homogenous routines. Demagogic talks about national-cultural regeneration are always in dissonance with the brute system of surplus value extraction. In order to use these weaknesses of fascism to its own benefit, the Left needs to adopt a liberatory conception of history. Instead of turning to the past to restore lost forms of order, we may understand the past as a rich collection of unheard appeals, unfulfilled hopes, of silenced demands for freedom - and such a relation to the past in turn shows us what is missing in the present and what cries out for completion.

Understood in this manner, the past denotes for us not mythical unity and purity but the history of systemic injustice, oppression, and exploitation, which in turn means that the past contains the energy that leads the way into the future. The past is not just what was. It is that which was never allowed to be, that which never could be, and it therefore points towards that which may yet be. A truly utopian and revolutionary imagination examines the past as an archive of emancipatory struggles that were repressed or abandoned but that reach into our present and herald a future through their continuous demand for realization.

Five Characteristics of Neo-imperialism: Building on Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

By Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin

Neoimperialism is the specific contemporary phase of historical development that features the economic globalization and financialization of monopoly capitalism. The characteristics of neoimperialism can be summed up on the basis of the following five key features. First is the new monopoly of production and circulation. The internationalization of production and circulation, together with the intensified concentration of capital, gives rise to giant multinational monopoly corporations whose wealth is nearly as great as that of whole countries. Second is the new monopoly of finance capital, which plays a decisive role in global economic life and generates a malformed development, namely, economic financialization. Third is the monopoly of the U.S. dollar and intellectual property, generating the unequal international division of labor and the polarization of the global economy and wealth distribution. Fourth is the new monopoly of the international oligarchic alliance. An international monopoly alliance of oligarchic capitalism, featuring one hegemonic ruler and several other great powers, has come into being and provides the economic foundation for the money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats that exploit and oppress on the basis of the monopoly. Fifth is the economic essence and general trend. The globalized contradictions of capitalism and various crises of the system often undergo an intensification that creates the new monopolistic and predatory, hegemonic and fraudulent, parasitic and decaying, transitional and moribund form of contemporary capitalism as late imperialism.

The historical evolution of capitalism has passed through several distinct stages. At the beginning of the twentieth century, capitalism reached the stage of private monopoly, which V. I. Lenin termed the imperialist stage. The era of imperialism brought with it the law of uneven economic and political development. In order to expand overseas and redistribute the territory of the world, the leading powers formed various alliances and launched a fierce struggle that led to two world wars. Eurasia suffered from continuous wars throughout the first half of the twentieth century. One after the other, national democratic revolutions and the communist movement developed continuously. After the Second World War, a number of economically underdeveloped countries adopted a socialist path of development, intensifying the confrontation between capitalism and socialism. Although The Communist Manifesto had long anticipated that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by socialism, this was only possible in a very few countries. The capitalist and imperialist system, despite suffering grave problems, survived. From the 1980s and early ’90s, capitalism carried out a strategic shift to neoliberal policies and evolved into its neoimperialist phase. This represents a new phase in the development of imperialism following the Cold War.

In his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin set out the definition and characteristics of imperialism as follows:

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.… We must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: (1) the concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.1

In an article published in December 1917, Lenin further elaborated that: “Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: imperialism is monopoly capitalism; parasitic, or decaying capitalism; moribund capitalism.”2

Based on Lenin’s theory of imperialism, we shall analyze contemporary capitalism while bearing in mind the recent changes it has undergone. Neoimperialism, we shall argue, is the phase of late imperialism that has arisen in the contemporary world, against the background of economic globalization and financialization.3 The character and features of neoimperialism can be summarized, as stated, around five aspects.

The New Monopoly of Production and Circulation

Lenin stated that the most profound economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. This is deeply rooted in the basic law of capitalist competition, which holds that competition results in the concentration of production and capital, and that this concentration will inevitably lead to monopoly when it reaches a certain level. In the early years of the twentieth century, the capitalist world experienced two huge waves of corporate mergers as the concentration of capital and of production reinforced each other. Production came increasingly to be concentrated in a small number of large companies, with the process bringing about organization on the basis of industrial monopolies with cross-sector multiproduct management. Instead of free competition, monopoly alliances held sway. Beginning in the early 1970s, capitalism encountered a “stagflation” crisis that lasted for nearly ten years, followed by a period of secular stagnation, or a long-term decline in growth rates. Economic recession and competitive pressures in the domestic market drove monopoly capital to seek new growth opportunities overseas. With the support of a new generation of information and communications technologies, foreign direct investment and international industrial transfers have continually reached new heights, with the degree of internationalization of production and circulation dwarfing that of the past.

Monopoly capital is being redistributed globally from production to circulation. Through the decentralization and internationalization of production processes, a system has arisen in which global value chains and the operational networks for organizing and managing multinational corporations have been divided up. The multinational companies coordinate their global value chains through complex networks of supplier relationships and through various governance models. In such systems, the processes involved in the production and trading of intermediate products and services are divided up and distributed around the world. The input and output transactions are carried out in the global production and service networks of the subsidiaries, contract partners, and suppliers of the multinational companies. According to statistics, about 60 percent of global trade consists of the exchange of intermediate products and services, and 80 percent of it is achieved via multinational companies.4

Within the new monopoly structures, the second characteristic of neoimperialism is the internationalization of production and circulation. The further concentration of capital leads to the rise of giant monopoly multinational corporations whose wealth may be as great as that of whole countries. Multinational corporations are the true representatives of contemporary international monopolism. The characteristics of the giant monopoly corporations can be summarized as follows.

1. The number of multinational corporations has grown globally, and the degree of socialization and internationalization of production and circulation has reached a higher level.

   Since the 1980s, multinational corporations have become the main driving force of international economic intercourse as the bearers of foreign direct investment. In the 1980s, foreign investment worldwide grew at an unprecedented rate, much faster than the growth during the same period of other major economic variables such as world output and trade. In the 1990s, the scale of international direct investment reached an unprecedented level. Multinationals established branches and affiliates around the world via foreign direct investment, the volume of which had expanded dramatically. Between 1980 and 2008, the number of global multinational companies increased from 15,000 to 82,000. The number of overseas subsidiaries grew even faster, from 35,000 to 810,000. In 2017, an average of over 60 percent of the assets and sales of the world’s one hundred top nonfinancial multinational companies were located or achieved abroad. Foreign employees accounted for approximately 60 percent of total staff.5

   Ever since the capitalist mode of production came into being, the concentration of production activities, expanding collaboration, and the evolution of the social division of labor have led to a continuous increase in the socialization of production. The decentralized labor processes are increasingly moving toward a joint labor process. The facts have proved that the sustained growth of outward foreign direct investment has strengthened the economic ties between all countries, as well as significantly increased the level of socialization and internationalization of the production and distribution systems, in which multinationals play a key role as the dominant force at the micro level. The internationalization of production and the globalization of trade have extensively redefined the way in which countries participate in the international division of labor, and this in turn has reshaped the production methods and profit models within those countries. Throughout the world, the majority of countries and regions are integrated into the network of international production and trade created by these giant corporations. Thousands of companies around the world form value creation nodes in the system of global production chains. Within the global economy, multinational firms have become the main channels for international investment and production, the core organizers of international economic activity, and the engine of global economic growth. The rapid development of multinational corporations shows that in the new imperialist phase constructed around the globalization of capital, the concentration of production and capital is reaching ever greater dimensions. Tens of thousands of multinational corporations now dominate everything.

2. The scale of accumulation by multinational monopoly capital is increasing, forming a multinational corporate empire.

   Although the number of multinational capitalist corporations is not especially large, they all possess great strength. They not only comprise the main force in the development and use of new technologies, but also control the marketing networks and more and more natural and financial resources. On this basis, they have monopolized the proceeds of production and circulation and equipped themselves with an unparalleled competitive advantage. Between 1980 and 2013, benefiting from the expansion of markets and the decline in production factor costs, the profits of the world’s largest 28,000 companies increased from $2 trillion to $7.2 trillion, representing an increase from 7.6 percent to approximately 10 percent of gross world product.6 In addition, these multinational corporations not only form alliances with organs of state power, but also develop links with the global financial system, together forming financial monopoly organizations backed by state support. The globalization and financialization of monopoly capital further consolidate its wealth accumulation. In terms of sales revenue, the economic scale of some multinational corporations exceeds that of a number of developed countries. In 2009, for example, Toyota’s annual sales exceeded the gross domestic product (GDP) of Israel. In 2017, Walmart, rated by the Fortune 500 list as the world’s largest company, achieved total revenues of more than $500 billion, greater than the GDP of Belgium. If we combine the data for multinational corporations and the world’s total of almost two hundred countries, and draw up a list of their annual revenues and GDPs, it becomes clear that the countries represent fewer than 30 percent of the world’s one hundred largest economies, while the corporations account for more than 70 percent.

   If world development continues along these lines, there will be more and more multinational companies whose wealth is similar to that of whole countries. Although industrial globalization has made economic activity more fragmented, vast quantities of profits still flow to a few countries of the developed capitalist world. Investment, trade, exports, and technology transfer are principally managed via the giant multinational corporations or their overseas branches, and the parent companies of these multinational monopolies remain tightly concentrated in geographic terms. In 2017, corporations from the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom accounted for half of the top five hundred companies in the world. Some two-thirds of the top one hundred multinationals are from these countries.

3. Multinational corporations monopolize the industries in their particular fields, controlling and running international production networks.

   The multinational giants have immense quantities of capital and formidable scientific and technological strengths, which ensure them a dominant position in global production, trade, investment, and finance, as well as in the creation of intellectual property. The economies of scale that result from the monopoly positions enjoyed by multinational corporations have expanded their competitive advantage. This is because “the larger the army of workers among whom the labour is subdivided, the more gigantic the scale on which machinery is introduced, the more in proportion does the cost of production decrease, the more fruitful is the labour.”7 The high degree of monopoly exercised by the multinational corporations means that the concentration of production and the concentration of control over markets reinforce each other, accelerating capital accumulation. Meanwhile, competition and credit, as two powerful levers for the concentration of capital, accelerate capital’s trend of coming under increasingly narrow control as it accumulates. Over the past thirty years, all of the world’s nations have promoted policy options aimed at boosting investment and relaxing the restrictions to which foreign direct investment is subject. Although the increasing scale of outward foreign direct investment by developed countries has to varying degrees accelerated capital formation and the development of human resources in underdeveloped countries, and increased their export competitiveness, it has also brought about large-scale privatization and cross-border mergers and acquisitions in these nations. This has accelerated the process through which small and medium enterprises are bankrupted or forced to merge with multinational corporations. Even relatively large enterprises are vulnerable.

   Around the world, many industries now have an oligopolistic market structure. For example, the global market for central processing units has been almost completely monopolized by the firms Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. As of 2015, the global market for seeds and pesticides was almost entirely controlled by six multinational companies—BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—that together controlled 75 percent of the global market for pesticides, 63 percent of the global market for seeds, and 75 percent of global private research in these areas. Syngenta, BASF, and Bayer alone controlled 51 percent of the global pesticide market, while DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta accounted for 55 percent of the seed market.8 According to statistics of the European Medical Devices Industry Group, the sales in 2010 of just twenty-five medical device companies accounted for more than 60 percent of the total sales of medical devices throughout the world. Ten multinationals controlled 47 percent of the global market for pharmaceuticals and related medical products. In China, soybeans are one of the vital food crops. All aspects of global soybean production, supply, and marketing chains are controlled by five multinational companies: Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. Monsanto controls the raw materials for seed production, while the other four control planting, trading, and processing. These multinationals form various alliances through joint ventures, cooperation, and long-term contractual agreements.9 As more and more social wealth is seized by fewer and fewer private capitalist giants, monopoly capital deepens its control and exploitation of labor. This leads to capital accumulation on a world scale, aggravating global overcapacity and the polarization between rich and poor.

In the era of neoimperialism, information and communications technology is developing rapidly. The emergence of the Internet has greatly reduced the time and space required for social production and circulation, bringing about a surge of cross-border mergers, investment, and trade. Consequently, more and more noncapitalist regions have been incorporated into the process of accumulation dominated by monopoly capital, which has greatly strengthened and expanded the world capitalist system. The socialization and internationalization of production and circulation have undergone a great leap during the era of capitalist economic globalization in the twenty-first century. The pattern, described in The Communist Manifesto, according to which “a cosmopolitan character” has been given “to production and consumption in every country” has been greatly strengthened.10 The globalization of monopoly capital requires world economic and political systems to be on the same track in order to eliminate the institutional barriers between them. However, when a number of postrevolutionary countries abandoned their earlier political and economic systems and turned to capitalism, they were not rewarded with the affluence and stability preached by neoliberal economists. On the contrary, the neoimperialist phase is the setting for the rampages of hegemony and monopoly capital.

The New Monopoly of Finance Capital

In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin stated: “The concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of the banks with industry—such is the history of the rise of finance capital and such is the content of that concept.”11 Finance capital is a new type of capital formed by the merger of bank monopoly capital and industrial monopoly capital. The turning point in the change from general capitalist rule to that of finance capital appeared around the beginning of the twentieth century, when banks in the leading imperialist countries were transformed from ordinary intermediaries into powerful monopolists. But before the Second World War, due to recurrent wars, high information transmission costs, and technical and institutional barriers such as trade protection, the linkages between global investment, trade, finance, and the market were relatively weak. The degree of globalization of the economy remained low, hindering the outward expansion of monopoly capital. After the Second World War, economic globalization was accelerated by the new technological revolution. In the early 1970s, rising oil prices triggered a worldwide economic crisis and brought about the grotesque phenomenon, impossible for Keynesian economics to explain, in which inflation and economic stagnation coexisted. In order to find profitable investment opportunities and escape from the “stagflation” quagmire, monopoly capital transferred traditional industries overseas, thus maintaining its original competitive advantage. Meanwhile, it accelerated its decoupling from the traditional industries and sought to open up new financial territory. Capitalist globalization and financialization catalyzed and supported each other, accelerating the “virtualization” of monopoly capital and the hollowing out of the real economy. The Western economic recession of the 1970s thus acted not only as a catalyst for the internationalization of monopoly capital, but also as the starting point for the financialization of industrial capital. Since then, monopoly capital has accelerated its turn from monopoly exercised in a single country to international monopoly, from the monopoly of the industrial entity to the monopoly of the financial industry.

Within the context of the new monopoly of finance capital, the second key characteristic of neoimperialism is that financial monopoly capital plays a decisive role in global economic life, giving rise to economic financialization.

Minority of Financial Institutions Control Main Global Economic Arteries

To seek monopolistic power is the very nature of imperialism. “The big enterprises, and the banks in particular, not only completely absorb the small ones, but also ‘annex’ them, subordinate them, bring them into their ‘own’ group or ‘concern’ (to use the technical term) by acquiring ‘holdings’ in their capital, by purchasing or exchanging shares, by a system of credits, etc.,” Lenin explains. “We see the rapid expansion of a close network of channels which cover the whole country, centralising all capital and all revenues, transforming thousands and thousands of scattered economic enterprises into a single national, capitalist, and then into a world capitalist economy.”12 At the neoimperialist phase, a small number of multinational corporations, most of them banks, have spread a very extensive and detailed operational network over the world via mergers, participation, and shareholding, and thus control not only countless small and medium enterprises but also the main global economic arteries. An empirical study by three Swiss scholars, Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, showed that a relatively small number of multinational banks effectively dominate the whole global economy. Based on their analysis of 43,060 multinational corporations all over the world and the shareholding relationships between them, they found that the top 737 multinational corporations controlled 80 percent of total global output. After further study of the complicated network of these relationships, they came up with the even more amazing discovery that a core consisting of 147 multinational corporations controlled nearly 40 percent of the economic value. Of the 147 corporations, some three-quarters were financial intermediaries.13

The Globalization of Monopoly-Finance Capital

When imperialism evolved into neoimperialism, the financial oligarchies and their agents set the rules of trade and investment aside, and proceeded to launch currency, trade, resource, and information wars, plundering resources and wealth globally and at will. Within this system, neoliberal economists play the role of spokespeople for the financial oligarchs, advocating for financial liberalization and globalization in the interests of the monopolists and enticing developing countries to liberalize their capital account restrictions. If the countries concerned follow this advice, exercising financial supervision will become more difficult and their vulnerability to the hidden dangers of the financial system will increase. The effect will be to provide more opportunities for financial monopoly capital to plunder these countries’ wealth. In their operations on capital markets, the international financial investment giants tend to attack the fragile financial firewalls of developing countries and seize opportunities to plunder the assets these countries have accumulated over decades. This indicates that financial globalization and liberalization have certainly established a unified and open global financial system, but in the meantime have created mechanisms through which the global center appropriates the resources and surplus value of the less developed periphery. Concentrated in the hands of a minority of the international financial oligarchies and armed with actual monopoly power, finance capital has gained increasing volumes of monopoly profits through foreign investment, new business ventures, and cross-border mergers and acquisitions. As finance capital continuously levies tribute from all over the world, the rule of the financial oligarchs is consolidated.

From Production to Speculative Finance

Financial monopoly capital, which has rid itself of the constraints associated with material form, is the highest and most abstract form of capital, and is extremely flexible and speculative. In the absence of regulation, financial monopoly capital is very likely to work against the goals set by a country for its industrial development. After the Second World War, under the guidance of state interventionism, commercial and investment banks were operated separately, the securities market was strictly supervised, and the expansion of finance capital and its speculative activity were heavily restricted. In the 1970s, as the influence of Keynesianism faded and neoliberal ideas began taking over, the financial industry began a process of deregulation and the basic forces controlling the operation of financial markets ceased to be those of governments and became the leading participants in the markets themselves. In the United States, the Jimmy Carter administration in 1980 enacted the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, which abolished the deposit and loan interest rate controls, and by 1986 interest rate liberalization was complete. In 1994, the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act ended all geographical restrictions on banking operations and allowed banks to conduct business across state lines, increasing the competition between financial institutions. In 1996, the National Securities Market Improvement Act was promulgated, markedly reducing supervision over the securities industry. The Financial Services Modernization Act followed in 1999, and the enforced separation of commercial banking from investment banking and insurance, a provision that had existed for nearly seventy years, was completely abolished. Advocates of financial liberalization initially claimed that if the government relaxed its supervision over financial institutions and financial markets, the efficiency with which financial resources were allocated would be further improved and the finance industry would be better able to boost economic growth. But finance capital has many unruly tendencies, and if restraints on it are lifted, it is quite capable of behaving like a runaway horse. Excessive financialization will inevitably lead to the virtualization of economic activities and to the emergence of huge bubbles of fictitious capital.

Over the past thirty years, finance capital has expanded in a process linked to the continuous deindustrialization of the economy. Because of the lack of opportunities for productive investment, financial transactions now have less and less to do with the real economy. Capital that is otherwise redundant is directed into speculative schemes, swelling the volume of fictitious assets in the virtual economy. In line with these developments, the cash flow of large enterprises has shifted extensively from fixed capital investment to financial investment, and corporate profits now come increasingly from financial activities. Between 1982 and 1990, almost a quarter of the sums previously invested in factory plant and equipment in the private real economy were shifted to the financial, insurance, and real estate sectors.14 Since the relaxation of financial restrictions in the 1980s and ’90s, supermarket chains have offered a wider and wider variety of financial products to the public, including credit and prepaid debit cards, savings and checking accounts, insurance plans, and even home mortgages.15 The shareholder value maximization principle popularized since the 1980s has forced CEOs to prioritize short-term goals. Rather than paying off debts or improving their company’s financial structure, CEOs in many cases use profits to buy back the company’s stocks, pushing up the stock price and thus increasing their own salaries. Of the companies listed on Standard & Poor’s 500 Index between 2003 and 2012, 449 invested a total of $2,400 billion to purchase their own shares. This sum corresponded to 54 percent of their total revenues, and another 37 percent of revenues were paid as dividends.16 In 2006, the expenditure by U.S. nonfinancial companies on repurchasing their own shares was equal to 43.9 percent of non-residential investment expenditure.17

The financial sector also dominates the distribution of surplus value within the nonfinancial sector. The sums paid as dividends and bonuses in the nonfinancial corporate sector account for a greater and greater proportion of total profits. Between the 1960s and the ’90s, the dividend payout ratio (the ratio of dividends to adjusted after-tax profits) of the U.S. corporate sector underwent a significant increase. While the average in the 1960s and ’70s was 42.4 and 42.3 percent, respectively, from 1980 to 1989 it never fell below 44 percent. Although total corporate profits fell by 17 percent, total dividends increased by 13 percent and the dividend payout ratio reached 57 percent.18 In the days before the U.S. financial crisis broke out in 2008, the proportion of net bonuses to net after-tax profits amounted to about 80 percent of companies’ final capital allocations.19 Further, the boom in the virtual economy has no relation whatever to the ability of the real economy to support such growth.

Stagnation and shrinkage in the real economy coexist with excessive development of the virtual economy. The value created in the real economy depends on such purchasing power as has appeared through the expansion of asset bubbles and the rise of asset prices, the so-called wealth effect. As the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, the financial institutions are obliged, with government backing, to rely on a variety of financial innovations to support credit-fueled consumption by citizens who are not asset owners and to disperse the resulting financial risks. Meanwhile, the huge income and wealth effects generated by the appearance on the scene of derivative financial products and the growth of asset bubbles attract more investors to the virtual economy. Driven by monopoly profits, numerous derivative financial products are created. The innovations in the area of financial products also lengthen the debt chain and serve to pass on financial risks. An example is the securitization of subprime mortgage loans; layer upon layer of these were packaged together with the seeming purpose of raising the credit rating of the products involved, but actually in order to transfer high levels of risk to others. Increasingly, the trade in financial products is separated from production; it is even possible to say that it has nothing to do with production and is solely a gambling transaction.

The Monopoly of the U.S. Dollar and Intellectual Property

Again, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin stated: “Typical of the old capitalism, when free competition held undivided sway, was the export of goods. Typical of the latest stage of capitalism, when monopolies rule, is the export of capital.”20 After the Second World War, the deepening and refining of the international division of labor brought more developing countries and regions into the global economic network. Within the global production mechanism, every country and enterprise is seemingly able to exercise its own comparative advantages. Even the least developed countries can rely on cheap labor and such resource advantages as it might have to allow participation in the international division of labor and cooperation. However, the real motive of monopoly capital is to compete for favorable trading platforms and to plunder high monopoly profits. In particular, the U.S. dollar hegemony and the developed-country monopoly of intellectual property mean that international exchange is seriously unequal. Thus, the characteristics of the old imperialism, coexisting with the commodity output, define the general capital output. Meanwhile, the characteristics of neoimperialism that coexist with the commodity output and the general capital output are the output of the U.S. dollar and intellectual property.

The third characteristic of neoimperialism is defined by the hegemony of the U.S. dollar and the developed-world monopoly of intellectual property, which together generate the unequal international division of labor along with a polarized global economy and wealth distribution. In each of the four aspects that can be summed up as state-capital, capital-labor, capital-capital, and state-state, the dominant forces of giant monopoly capital and neoimperialism are further strengthened under the conditions of economic globalization and financial liberalization.

The Spatial Expansion of the Capital-Labor Relation: Global Value Chains and the Global Labor Arbitrage

Through mechanisms that include outsourcing, setting up subsidiaries, and establishing strategic alliances, multinationals integrate more and more countries and companies into the global production networks they dominate. The reason why capital accumulation can be achieved on this global scale is the existence of a large, low-cost global workforce. According to data from the International Labor Organization, the world’s total workforce grew from 1.9 to 3.1 billion between 1980 and 2007. Of these people, 73 percent were from developing countries, with China and India accounting for 40 percent.21 Multinational corporations are all organized entities, while the global workforce finds it exceedingly difficult to unite effectively and defend its rights. Because of the existence of the global reserve army of labor, capital can use the strategy of divide and conquer to discipline wage workers. Over decades, monopoly capital has shifted the production sectors of developed-world economies to the countries of the Global South, compelling workforces in different areas of the globe to compete with one another for basic living incomes. Through this process, multinationals are able to extort huge imperialist rents from the world’s workers.22 In addition, these giant corporations are well able to lobby and pressure the governments of developing countries to formulate policies that benefit the flow of capital and investment. Trying to secure GDP growth by inducing international capital to invest and set up factories, many developing country governments not only ignore the protection of social welfare and labor rights, but also guarantee various preferential measures such as tax concessions and credit support. The globalization of production has thus enabled the developed capitalist countries to exploit the less developed world in a more “civil” fashion under the slogan of fair trade. In order to launch their modernization, developing countries often have little choice but to accept the capital offered by the imperialists—along with the conditions and encumbrances that go with it.

Monopoly-Finance Capital and Multinational Corporate Dominance

The new structure of the international division of labor inherits the old unbalanced and unequal system. Although production and marketing are fragmented, the control centers of research and development, finance, and profit are still the multinational corporations. These corporate entities usually occupy the top of the vertical division of labor, owning the intellectual property rights associated with core components. The giant, globe-straddling corporations are in charge of formulating technology and product standards, as well as controlling the design, research, and development links. Meanwhile, their “partners” in developing countries are typically contracted to multinational corporations and are the recipients of such product standards. They usually engage in such labor-intensive activities as production, processing, and assembly, and are responsible for producing simple parts in mass quantities. Performing relatively unspecialized factory operations for multinationals, these enterprises earn only slender profits. The jobs in these enterprises generally feature low wages, high labor intensity, long working hours, and poor working environments. Although the value embodied in the products is primarily created by production workers in developing-world factories, most of the value additions are plundered by the multinationals via unequal exchange within the production networks. The proportion of overseas profits within the total profits of U.S. corporations increased from 5 percent in 1950 to 35 percent in 2008. The proportion of overseas-retained profits increased from 2 percent in 1950 to 113 percent in 2000. The proportion of overseas profits within the total profits of Japanese corporations increased from 23.4 percent in 1997 to 52.5 percent in 2008.23 In a slightly different accounting, the share of foreign profits of U.S. corporations as a percent of U.S. domestic corporate profits increased from 4 percent in 1950 to 29 percent in 2019.24 Multinational corporations are often able to use their monopoly of intellectual property to generate huge returns. Intellectual property includes product design, brand names, and symbols and images used in marketing. These are protected by rules and laws covering patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Figures from the UN Conference on Trade and Development show that royalties and licensing fees paid to multinational corporations increased from $31 billion in 1990 to $333 billion in 2017.25

With the advance of financial liberalization, finance capital no longer merely serves industrial capital, but has far overtaken it. The financial oligarchs and rentiers are now dominant. In the space of just twenty years from 1987, debt in the international credit market soared from just under $11 billion to $48 billion, with a rate of growth far exceeding that of the world economy as a whole.26

Neoimperialism and the Neoliberal State

Since the mid–1970s, economic stagflation has seen Keynesianism abandoned by governments, or employed much less. Neoliberal approaches such as modern monetarism, the rational expectations school, and supply-side theories are hits among economists, and dominate economic theory and policy in the neoimperialist countries. This is because these approaches accord with the expanding globalization and financialization of monopoly capital. Neoliberalism is a superstructure that has arisen on the basis of financial monopoly capital; essentially, it represents the basis for the ideology and policies required to maintain the rule of neoimperialism. In the 1980s, U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher were the world standard-bearers of neoliberalism. Advocating the ideas of modern monetarism and the positions of the private property and supply-side schools, they implemented privatization and market-oriented reforms, relaxed government supervision, and weakened the power of labor unions to defend working-class rights. After taking office, Reagan immediately approved the establishment of a special group of CEOs, with vice president George H. W. Bush as its director, to revoke or relax regulations. The changes advocated by the group related to job safety, labor protection, and the protection of consumer interests. The Reagan administration also joined forces with big capitalists to crack down on labor unions in the public and private sectors, dismissing union leaders and organizers and leaving the working class, already in a weak position, even worse off. The so-called Washington-Wall Street Complex argued that the interests of Wall Street and those of the United States were identical; what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The U.S. government had in practice become a tool for the financial oligarchy to pursue its economic and political interests.27 Therefore, it was not the votes of citizens, or even the democratic system of the separation of powers, but the Wall Street financial oligarchy and the military-industrial complex that ultimately controlled the government. Wall Street influenced the political process and policy formation in the United States by providing campaign contributions and manipulating the media. Held captive by monopoly interest groups, the U.S. government had little power to promote the sound development of the economy and society and to improve people’s livelihood. The list of Wall Street executives with annual salaries of tens of millions of dollars features numerous matches with the people holding top U.S. government posts. For example, the seventieth U.S. secretary of the treasury, Robert Edward Rubin, had previously spent twenty-six years working for investment bankers Goldman Sachs. The seventy-fourth secretary of the treasury, Henry Paulson, had earlier served the Goldman Sachs Group as its chairman and CEO. Many senior officials of the Donald Trump administration also had histories as executives of monopoly enterprises. The existence of this “revolving door” mechanism means that even if the government were to introduce relevant financial regulatory policies, it would be hard fundamentally to shake the interests of the financial chaebols of Wall Street.

Whenever a financial crisis occurs, the government provides emergency assistance to the monopoly oligarchs of Wall Street. U.S. scholars have found that the Federal Reserve has used secret emergency loans to meet the needs of large Wall Street interest groups, in some instances providing strong support to bankers who are board members of regional Federal Reserve banks. In 2007, the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis broke out. Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street’s top five investment banks, was acquired by JPMorgan Chase. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch was acquired by Bank of America. Goldman Sachs, however, survived; the main reasons include a decision by the government to urgently grant Goldman Sachs the status of a holding company, allowing it to obtain massive life-saving funds from the Federal Reserve. In addition, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission banned the shorting of financial stocks.28

U.S. Dollar Hegemony, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Plundering of Global Wealth

In July 1944, on the initiative of the U.S. and British governments, representatives of forty-four countries gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss plans for the postwar monetary system. In the course of the Bretton Woods Conference, the documents Final Act of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund, and Articles of Agreement of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—collectively known as the Bretton Woods Agreements—were passed. A key point of the Bretton Woods system was to construct an international monetary order centered on the U.S. dollar.29 Other currencies were pegged to the dollar, which was in turn pegged to gold. The U.S. dollar then began to play the role of world currency, replacing the British pound. The unique advantage that derives from the central place of the U.S. dollar in the international monetary system gives the U.S. a special position compared to the rest of the world’s countries. The U.S. dollar makes up 70 percent of global currency reserves, while accounting for 68 percent of international trade settlements, 80 percent of foreign exchange transactions, and 90 percent of international banking transactions. Because the U.S. dollar is the internationally recognized reserve currency and trade settlement currency, the United States is not only able to exchange it for real commodities, resources, and labor, and thus to cover its long-term trade deficit and fiscal deficit, but can also make cross-border investments and carry out cross-border mergers of overseas enterprises employing the U.S. dollars that it prints at almost no cost. The hegemony of the U.S. dollar provides an excellent illustration of the predatory nature of neoimperialism. The United States can also obtain international seigniorage by exporting U.S. dollars, and can reduce its foreign debt by depreciating the U.S. dollar or assets that are priced in U.S. dollars. The hegemony of the U.S. dollar has also caused the transfer of wealth from debtor countries to creditor countries. This means that poor countries subsidize the rich, which is completely unfair.

Since the mid–1990s, international monopolies have controlled 80 percent of the world’s patents, technology transfers, and most of the internationally recognized trademarks, something that has brought them large quantities of revenue. According to figures from Science and Engineering Indicators 2018 Digest, released by the National Science Council of America in January 2018, the total global cross-border licensing income from intellectual property in 2016 was $272 billion. The United States was the largest exporter of intellectual property, with income from this source comprising as much as 45 percent of the global total. The corresponding figure for the European Union was 24 percent, for Japan 14 percent, and for China less than 5 percent. In sharp contrast, the royalties on intellectual property paid by China to other countries increased from $1.9 billion in 2001 to $28.6 billion in 2017, and China’s deficit on cross-border intellectual property transactions reached more than $20 billion. During this period, the U.S. annual net income from licensing intellectual property to other countries was at least $80 billion.30

The New Monopoly of the International Oligarchic Alliance

Lenin stated in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that “the epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations between capitalist associations grow up, based on the economic division of the world; while parallel to and in connection with it, certain relations grow up between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the “struggle for spheres of influence.”31 Finance capital and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world, give rise to a number of transitional forms of state dependence. Two main groups of countries—those owning colonies and colonies themselves—are typical of this epoch, as are the diverse forms of dependent countries that, politically, are formally independent, but in fact are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence.32 Nowadays, neoimperialism has formed new alliances and hegemonic relations in the economic, political, cultural, and military fields.

Within the context of the new monopoly of the international oligarchs, the fourth characteristic of neoimperialism is the formation of an international monopoly capitalist alliance between one hegemon and several other great powers. An economic foundation consisting of money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats has been formed for them to exploit and oppress via monopoly both at home and abroad.

The G7 as the Mainstay of the Imperial Capitalist Core

Neoimperialism’s current international monopoly economic alliance and the framework of global economic governance are both dominated by the United States. The G6 group was formed in 1975 by six leading industrial countries, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and Italy, and became G7 when Canada joined the following year. G7 and its monopoly organizations are the coordination platforms, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization are the functional bodies. The global order of economic governance that was set up under the Bretton Woods system after the Second World War is essentially a high-level international capitalist monopoly alliance manipulated by the United States to serve its strategic economic and political interests. In the early 1970s, the U.S. dollar was decoupled from gold and the Bretton Woods currency system collapsed. One after another, summits of the G7 countries then shouldered responsibility for strengthening the Western consensus, contending against the socialist countries of the East, and boycotting the demands made by the less developed countries of the South for reforms to the international economic and political order.33 Since neoliberalism became the set of concepts dominating global economic governance, these multilateral institutions and platforms have become the driving force for the expansion of neoliberalism throughout the world. In line with the wishes of the international financial monopoly oligarchy and its allies, these bodies spare no effort to induce the developing countries to implement financial liberalization, the privatization of production factors, marketization without prior supervision, and free exchange in capital projects so as to facilitate inward and outward flows of international “hot money.” These institutions are constantly ready to control and plunder the economies of developing countries, extracting huge profits by encouraging speculation and creating financial bubbles. As Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in The Grand Chessboard, “the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank can be said to represent ‘global’ interests, and their constituency may be construed as the world. In reality, however, they are heavily American dominated.”34

Since the 1980s, the IMF and World Bank have lured developing countries to implement neoliberal reforms. When these countries have fallen into crisis because of privatization and financial liberalization, the IMF and other institutions have forced them to accept the Washington Consensus by adding various unreasonable conditions to loans provided earlier. The effect is to further intensify the impacts of neoliberal reform. Between 1978 and 1992, more than seventy developing countries or former socialist countries implemented a total of 566 structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.35 In the early 1980s, for example, the IMF used the Latin American debt crisis to force Latin American countries to accept neoliberal “reforms.” In order to curb inflation, the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1979 pushed short-term interest rates up from 10 percent to 15 percent, and finally to more than 20 percent. Because the existing debt of the developing countries was linked to U.S. interest rates, every 1 percent rise in U.S. interest rates would result in developing-world debtor countries paying an additional $40 to 50 billion per year in interest. In the second half of 1981, Latin America was borrowing at the rate of $1 billion a week, mostly in order to pay the interest on existing debt. During 1983, interest payments consumed almost half of Latin American export earnings.36 Under pressure to repay their loans, Latin American countries were forced to accept neoliberal reform plans initiated by the IMF. The main content of these plans consisted of privatizing state-owned enterprises; liberalizing trade finance; implementing economic austerity policies, with the effect of reducing living standards; cutting the taxes on monopoly enterprises; and reducing government spending on social infrastructure. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the IMF attached numerous conditions to assistance provided to South Korea, including that the allowance for foreign shareholdings be relaxed from 23 percent to 50 percent, and then to 55 percent by December 1998. Moreover, South Korea was required to allow foreign banks to set up branches freely.37

NATO and the International Monopoly-Capitalist Military and Political Alliance

Established in the early days of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an international military alliance for the defense of monopoly capitalism. It is led by the United States and involves other imperialist countries. During the Cold War, NATO was the main tool used by the United States to actively contain and counter the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, as well as to influence and control the Western European countries. At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Treaty Organization was dissolved and NATO became the military organization through which the United States sought to achieve its strategic goals on a global level. A capitalist military oligopoly, involving one hegemon and several other great powers, had come into being. Former U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher stated: “Only the United States can act as a leader.… For the United States to exercise leadership requires us to own a credible force threat as a backup for diplomacy.”38 The National Security Strategy for the New Century, published in the United States in December 1998, claimed unambiguously that the goal of the United States was to “lead the entire world” and that no challenge to its leadership, from any country or group of countries, would ever be allowed to come into being.39 On December 4, 2018, U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo declared in a speech to the Marshall Fund in Brussels: “The United States has not given up its global leadership. It reshaped the order after WWII based on sovereignty but not the multilateral system.… Under President Trump’s leadership, we will not give up international leadership or our allies in the international system.… Trump is recovering America’s traditional status as the world center and leadership.… The United States wants to lead the world, now and always.”40

To achieve leadership and domination over the world, the United States has made every effort to promote NATO’s eastward expansion, and has expanded its own sphere of influence to control Central and Eastern Europe and to compress Russia’s strategic space. Under the control of the United States, NATO has become an ideal military tool for U.S. global interests. In March 1999, a multinational NATO force led by the United States launched a large-scale air attack on Yugoslavia. It was the first time that NATO had launched a military strike against a sovereign country during the fifty years since its foundation. In April 1999, NATO held a summit meeting in Washington, formally adopting a strategic concept that can be summarized under two points. First, NATO was permitted to conduct collective military intervention outside its defense area in response to “crimes and conflicts involving common interests.” This effectively changed NATO from a “collective defense” military alliance into an offensive political and military organization with the so-called purpose of defending common interests and shared values. Second, NATO’s military actions did not require authorization from the UN Security Council.41

In addition to NATO, U.S. military alliances formed on the basis of bilateral treaties include pacts with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. There are U.S. military bases on the territory of all its military allies, and these comprise a major part of the neoimperialist military alliance. The United States and its allies make military threats and carry out provocations in many regions of the world, resulting in many “hot wars,” “warm wars,” “cool wars,” and “new cold wars,” intensifying the new arms race. The acts of “state terrorism” carried out by neoimperialism, and the double standard it applies to counter-terrorism, have caused other forms of terrorism to multiply.

Cultural Hegemony Dominated by Western “Universal Values”

In addition to its economic might and the hegemony exercised through its military alliances, neoimperialism is also characterized by cultural hegemony dominated by Western “universal values.” U.S. political scientist Joseph Nye emphasized that soft power was the ability to accomplish one’s desires through attraction rather than force or purchase. The soft power of a country is constituted mainly of three resources, namely, culture (which functions where it is attractive to the local population), political values (which function when they can actually be practiced both at home and abroad), and foreign policy (which functions when it is regarded as conforming to legality and as enhancing moral prestige).42 The Western developed countries, especially the United States, utilize their capital, technology, and market advantages to infiltrate less powerful countries and regions with their culture, and propose a series of “new interventionist” cultural theories designed to impose U.S. values. The United States subjugates the cultural markets and information spaces of other countries, especially developing countries, by exporting to them U.S. values and lifestyles, with the goal of making its culture the “mainstream culture” of the world.43

Cultural hegemony or cultural imperialism exports the “universal values” of the West and implements both peaceful evolution and “color revolutions” by controlling the field of international public opinion. The objective is to achieve Richard Nixon’s strategic goal of “victory without war.” The evolution of the Soviet Union and of the socialist countries in Eastern Europe is a typical case. As is generally known, the penetration of values is usually slow, long-term, and subtle, and its communication channels are often hidden in academic exchanges, literary works, films, and television shows. For example, Hollywood is “the megaphone of American hegemonic policy.… Hollywood films are showing off the advantages of the United States to the rest of the world and trying to achieve their cultural conquest by this means.”44 Former senior CIA official Allen Dulles argued: “If we teach young people in the Soviet Union to sing our songs and dance with them, sooner or later we will teach them to think in the way we need them to.”45 Foundations and think tanks are also important driving forces for the spread of neoliberalism. For example, the U.S.-based Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Mont Pelerin Society, and Center for International Private Enterprise participate in the promotion of neoliberal values by funding seminars and academic organizations.

Lenin once stated: “Instead of an undivided monopoly of Great Britain, we see a few imperialist powers contending for the right to share in this monopoly, and this struggle is characteristic of the whole period of the early twentieth century.”46 Since the end of the Cold War, global capitalism has been characterized by the undivided monopoly of the United States. Other powers have no intention, and lack the strength, to compete. Some individual countries such as Japan have tried to challenge U.S. “monopoly rights” economically and technologically, but have ultimately failed. So it is with the European Union, which emerged later but eventually failed to shake U.S. hegemony. In the military field, the Gulf War and the subsequent wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have further fueled U.S. unilateralism and hegemonic arrogance. With the help of its economic, military, and political alliances, and employing cultural soft power, the United States promotes its “universal values,” incites street protests and color revolutions in other countries, and forces developing countries to deregulate their financial systems by targeting them for the creation of debt and financial crises. When the global governance system dominated by the United States encounters challenges, it launches trade wars, science and technology wars, financial wars, and economic sanctions, and even goes so far as to threaten or actually launch military strikes. The U.S. dollar, military, and culture are the three pillars of U.S. imperialist hegemony, supporting “hard power,” “soft power,” “strong power” (economic sanctions), and “smart power.”47

In short, the international monopoly capitalist alliance made up of one hegemon and several great powers provides the economic foundation for the money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats that exploit and oppress through the exercise of monopoly both at home and abroad, and that amplify the power of the United States as the neoimperialist hegemon.

The Economic Essence, the General Trend, and the Four Forms of Ideological Fraud

Lenin characterized imperialism as a transitional and moribund capitalism. At the neoimperialist stage known as economic globalization, the basic contradiction of the contemporary capitalist economy is manifested in the contradiction between, on the one hand, the constant socialization and globalization of the economy with its production factors under private, collective, or state ownership, and, on the other, the disorder or anarchy of production within national economies and in the world economy.48 Neoimperialism rules out the adjustments that states and international communities need to make, instead promoting self-regulation by private monopoly capital and defending its interests. The effect, very often, is to intensify various contradictions within countries or on the world level. Economic, financial, fiscal, social, and ecological crises have all become epidemic diseases. Various of these crises are interwoven with social contradictions, or with the contradictions of capital accumulation. All of them together lend a new cast to the monopolistic and predatory, hegemonic and fraudulent, parasitic and decaying, transitional and moribund capitalism of the present epoch.

If we define neoimperialism with regard to its economic nature and general tendencies, we may conclude that its three characteristics are demonstrated in the respect that the globalized contradictions and various crises of the system frequently become intensified.

The economic essence of neoimperialism is that it is a monopolistic financial capitalism established on the basis of giant multinationals. The production monopoly and financial monopoly of the multinational corporations have their origins in the higher stage of production and capital concentration, giving rise to a phase in which monopoly is deeper and broader to such an extent that “nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.”49 The automobile industry may be taken as an example. The production of the top five multinational automobile corporations accounts for almost half of global automobile production, and that of the top ten accounts for 70 percent.50 International monopolistic financial capital not only controls the world’s major industries, but also monopolizes almost all sources of raw materials, scientific and technological talent, and skilled physical labor in all fields, controlling the transportation hubs and various means of production. It dominates and controls capital, and controls various other global functions via banks and a variety of financial derivatives and shareholding systems.51 If we consider the total market value and total income and assets of corporations, the scale of the leading concentrations of economic power around the world is increasing, especially in the case of the top one hundred corporations. In 2015, the market value of the world’s top hundred companies was more than seven thousand times that of the bottom two thousand companies in a database of the world’s largest nonfinancial firms, compared to only thirty-one times in 1995.52 According to the data on the Fortune Global 500 for the year 2017, the revenues of 380 of the world’s top 500 companies (excluding Chinese firms) reached $22.83 trillion, equivalent to 29.3 percent of gross world product. Total profits reached $1.51 trillion, breaking the record, and the rate of profit increased by 18.85 percent year on year.53 The rise in the indicators of both profit share and profit rate illustrates the predatory nature of neoimperialism.

Given that economic globalization, financialization, and neoliberal policies are placing a triple squeeze on labor, profits are growing rapidly, while workers’ wages are increasing much more slowly.54 Between 1982 and 2006, the average annual growth of the real wages of production workers in nonfinancial corporations in the United States was just 1.1 percent, not only much lower than the 2.43 percent recorded from 1958 to 1966, but also lower than the 1.68 percent during the economic downturn from 1966 to 1982. The slowing of wage growth allowed the corporations’ profit share to rise by 4.6 percent during this period and accounted for 82 percent of the recovery in the rate of profit. The “labor squeeze” can be seen to have played a key role here.55 Moreover, since the U.S. economy began to recover in 2009 from the Great Financial Crisis, the average rate of profit, though lower than its peak in 1997, has still been significantly higher than its level during the late 1970s and early ’80s, when it was at a low point.56 The essence of neoimperialism is its need to control and plunder. Its drive to “predatory accumulation” is not only demonstrated by its exploitation of labor in the national setting, but also by its plunder of other countries. The forms this takes, and the methods employed, consist mainly of the following.

First, financial plunder. Neoimperialism extracts huge profits from its control over the prices of major international commodities. Employing financialization and other methods, it pressures the countries that produce raw materials, seeking to keep prices low. As part of its pressures and harassment, it may create financial bubbles and crises via large-scale inflows and outflows of capital, affecting the economic and political stability of the countries concerned. Or, it may seek to achieve a “victory without war” by imposing financial sanctions.57 Financial innovation and the lag in government regulation contributes to waves of nonproductive speculation. Financial oligarchs and multinational corporations at the top of the pyramid benefit from the price inflation of financial assets and are able to plunder huge quantities of social wealth.

Second is the privatization of public resources and state-owned assets. Since Thatcher-Reaganism came to dominate economic policy-making in numerous countries some forty years ago, the world has experienced a massive wave of large-scale privatization. The public assets of many less-developed countries have fallen into the hands of private monopoly capital and multinational corporate monopolies. The global level of inequality of wealth ownership has soared accordingly. The World Inequality Report 2018 reveals that, since the 1970s, private wealth in various countries has generally increased, while the ratio of private to national income in most “rich” countries has increased from 200–350 percent to 400–700 percent. In sharp contrast, public wealth has steadily declined. The net public wealth of the United States and the United Kingdom has fallen to a negative number in recent years, and that of Japan, Germany, and France is only slightly above zero. The limited value of public assets restricts the ability of governments to adjust the income gap.58

Third is the strengthening of the center-periphery pattern. The neoimperialist countries reinforce the center-periphery pattern through their dominant positions in trade, currency, finance, the military arena, and international organizations. Taking advantage of these positions, they continuously extort the resources and wealth of the peripheral countries to consolidate their monopoly or oligopoly status, and to ensure their own development and prosperity. The international transfer rate of surplus value has a positive effect on the general rate of profit in the hegemonic countries.59 It is only the neoimperialist countries that are able to use their economic, political, and military power to transform a portion of the surplus value created by underdeveloped countries into their own national wealth. Consequently, the accumulation of monopolistic capital by neoimperialism intensifies the polarization between rich and poor and damages people’s livelihoods in countries such as the United States and France (as proved by the international Occupy Wall Street movement, which involved eighty countries with its slogan of “we are the 99 percent”), while also reinforcing the accumulation of financial and environmental wealth in the countries of the “center” and of relative poverty and pollution in the countries of the “periphery.” In 2018, the combined GDP of the G7 “central” countries reached $317 trillion, accounting for 45.5 percent of gross world product.60 According to the Global Wealth Report 2013, prepared by Credit Suisse, the wealth of the 85 richest people in the world that year was equivalent to the total assets of the world’s poorest 3.5 billion people—that is, of half the global population.61

Economic Hegemony and Fraud

Imperialism as represented by the United States employs hegemony, bullying, and unilateralism, and adheres to double standards in diplomatic policy. At one point, Pompeo publicly admitted and expressed pride in his country’s fraudulent actions. “I was the CIA director,” he said. “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses…it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”62 In the post-Cold War era, the United States dominates the world, free from any powerful checks and balances. It relies on its major advantages of military force, U.S. dollar hegemony, external propaganda, and science and technology to carry out bullying all over the world and to commit fraud both at home and abroad.63

In March 2018, the United States issued a document entitled Findings of the Investigation into China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which accuses China of “enforcing or compelling US enterprises to transfer technology” and “illegally invading US commercial computer networks to steal intellectual property rights and sensitive business information.” The purpose of this document was to create a pretext for launching a trade war; its accusations are nothing but rumors and do not correspond to the facts. What is the source of China’s technological progress? It flows from the efforts of gifted entrepreneurs who benefit from huge government investments in basic science. As former U.S. secretary of the treasury Lawrence Summers said, “it’s coming from an educational system that’s privileging excellence, concentrating on science and technology. That’s where their leadership is coming from, not from taking a stake in some U.S. company.”64 In provoking its economic and trade conflict with China, the United States has had an obvious intention: to blackmail and suppress China on an overall basis, starting with the trade war and gradually expanding into the areas of science and technology, finance, food, resources, and so on. U.S. authorities seek to weaken China’s strengths in trade, finance, industry, and technology, trying to ensure that China will not pose a challenge to the global hegemonic position of the United States.

With its slogan of “America First,” the Trump administration promoted U.S. hegemony and imposed economic sanctions on other economies. Its economic and trade policies were aimed principally at China, but were also directed at traditional allies such as the European Union, Japan, India, and South Korea. Time after time, Washington has practiced economic extortion and containment. It will never be forgotten that as early as the mid–1980s the United States forced Japan to sign the Plaza Accord and induced it to implement a low-interest monetary policy that brought large quantities of foreign capital into Japan. The result was that a surge of short-term demand for Japanese yen caused the country’s currency to appreciate sharply against the U.S. dollar. The influx of foreign capital and the monetary policy of low interest rates brought a soaring increase in Japanese asset prices. Despite the short-term prosperity, the eventual result involved big losses for Japan. The high asset prices meant that the foreign capital was soon cashed out and withdrawn, while the Japanese economy suffered huge setbacks and endured a “lost twenty years.”

Political Hegemony and Fraud

The United States has always labeled itself a representative of countries advocating democracy, freedom, and equality. Using political and diplomatic means, it spares no effort to impose its political system on other countries, especially the developing states it identifies as “dictatorships.” Former U.S. president George W. Bush identified Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” The United States exerts pressure on the rulers of such countries, applying double standards on questions of human rights. Using its propaganda, it demonizes these states as “undemocratic” and “autocratic,” while subsidizing nongovernmental organizations and media, as well as inciting dissidents and the opposition to mount “color revolutions” aimed at overthrowing the legitimate governments.

Acting at the behest of its military circles and monopoly energy groups, the United States has been a consistently destructive force in the Middle East and Latin America. Syria was listed by Washington among six “evil” countries, and the United States branded the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad as illegal. U.S. senator John McCain, however, revealed the real purpose behind these moves. “The end of the Assad regime,” McCain stated, “would sever Hezbollah’s lifeline to Iran, eliminate a long-standing threat to Israel, bolster Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, and inflict a strategic defeat on the Iranian regime. It would be a geopolitical success of the first order.”65 In Latin America, the United States has continued its blockade against Cuba despite twenty resolutions carried overwhelmingly in the UN General Assembly. Meanwhile, the United States is conducting an economic blockade against Venezuela, resulting in the country’s economic deterioration in recent years. Former U.S. vice president Mike Pence, setting aside Venezuela’s elections and popular support for the government, with no consideration of truth—even leaving out the U.S. economic siege war on Venezuela in violation of international law—pronounced: “The Maduro government’s vicious gangs have crippled the economy.… The true cost of the crimes of the Maduro regime cannot be assessed in numbers.… Two million people have fled the result of dictatorship and political repression that’s resulted in deprivation and created conditions near starvation. The United States will continue to help the Venezuelan people restore their freedom. The people will be free.”66

The United States is now applying to China the kind of Cold War policies that used to be employed against the Soviet Union. State department director of policy planning Kiron Skinner describes the fractious relations of the United States with China as “a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology.”67 The U.S. ruling class knows very well that the socialist system is superior to the capitalist system. Once large socialist countries such as the former Soviet Union and China become rich and strong through peaceful competition, it is inevitable that they are faced with confronting the hegemonic aims of the United States, which seeks nothing less than a unipolar world. Any attempts to promote broad reforms in the outdated imperial economic and political order are seen as a threat to U.S. hegemony. Consequently, the United States has adopted the dual strategy of “contact and containment,” engagement and aggression, which it seeks to pass off as “peaceful evolution.”

In reality, the so-called democratic politics in the United States are nothing but an illusion. First, the electoral process in the United States has increasingly amounted to a political fight between the two parties of the monopoly bourgeoisie. As the candidates of different factions of the monopoly bourgeoisie have campaigned for election, they have resorted to rumors, personal attacks, and slanders against their opponents, sidelining the real issue. Second, so-called democratic politics in the United States involve no more than a pro forma and procedural democracy. The pro forma voting system has been reduced to monetary politics, family politics, and oligarchic politics—that is, to an essentially undemocratic “despotism of monopoly capital,” or democracy for the few.

Cultural Hegemony and Fraud

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Brzezinski believes that “strengthening American culture as the ‘model’ of the world’s cultures is a strategy that must be implemented by the United States to maintain hegemony.”68 U.S. cultural hegemony is manifested principally through its control of media outlets and education, and through the propaganda function, both at home and abroad, of its literature and art, its liberal arts academia, and its values. The United States exports films, music, and literature all over the world. It controls almost 75 percent of the world’s television programs, and owns powerful film and television companies such as WarnerMedia, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, and Columbia Pictures, which every year produce dozens of high-budget films involving investments of hundreds of millions of dollars. Research and reporting carried out by the U.S. mainstream media effectively dominate the shaping of world public opinion. The United States also controls the authoritative journals that mold discourse in the area of liberal arts academia, and it is the United States that determines the standards of elite education. The 2020 QS World University Rankings provide an example. The top places in these rankings are all taken by U.S. universities, and this situation provides a powerful tool for spreading deceptive Western “universal values,” Western constitutional views, and neoliberal economic concepts throughout the world. The basic views of the U.S. liberal arts establishment have taken a firm hold on the elites and masses at home and abroad.69 For example, the United States extols vulgar examples of literary and artistic kitsch as distinguished works of culture, deserving of Oscars or Nobel Prizes.

Neoclassical economics (and its counterpart in the form of neoliberalism) is responsible for a string of economic crises and for increased polarization between rich and poor. Nevertheless, it is depicted as a scientific theory that promotes development, increases popular welfare, and is worthy of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. In the United States, works that do not conform to the literary, artistic, and liberal arts canons of monopoly capital are difficult to disseminate via authoritative media, while writers and artists of real distinction are excluded, suppressed, or defrauded. The United States also holds an absolutely dominant position in the global field of cyberspace. Of the thirteen root Domain Name System servers, nine are under the direct control of U.S. corporations, universities, or government departments, while another is directly controlled by a U.S. nonprofit organization.70 Using these root Domain Name System servers, the United States can easily steal global intelligence, carry out network monitoring, and launch cyberattacks. The surveillance program PRISM, revealed by Edward Snowden, shows that the United States has complete control over the hardware and software of networks globally, and is well able to monitor the entire world and strike any other country. Lastly, the United States controls the intelligence alliance known as the Five Eyes (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), through which it conducts large-scale monitoring activities and exercises cyber hegemony domestically and internationally.71

The cultural hegemony of the United States, its control over liberal arts academia, and the fraudulent use to which these advantages are put also appear in the stances taken by the United States on questions of ideology and values. These stances are always hostile to socialism and communism, and restrict the development of socialist countries. Previously, the United States devoted most of its efforts to smearing the Soviet Union, but the main target is now China. Early in May 1990, Nixon stated frankly: “While rebuilding the relationship with China, it is very important that we continue to pressure them to abandon socialism. Because we will use this relationship to make China’s policies milder. We must stick to this key point.”72 According to survey data from the U.S. Pew Research Center—an organization surely influenced by U.S. cultural hegemony and fraud—74 percent of Chinese college or university graduates love U.S. culture.73 It is a fact that most Chinese liberal arts scholars who have studied in the United States favor its basic institutional academic theories. To varying extents, they worship, flatter, and fear the United States. This seriously affects the confidence of Chinese citizens in Marxist culture, in socialist culture, and in China’s own rich traditional culture, and needs to be eliminated as soon as possible.

Military Hegemony and Fraud

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States has become increasingly presumptuous and has tended to resort to military force or threats in dealing with questions of international relations. In 1999, U.S.-led NATO forces bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, invoking the formula of “human rights above sovereignty.” In 2003, despite strong opposition from other countries, the United States invaded the sovereign state of Iraq. The Iraq War was not authorized by the UN Security Council, and Washington did not have any legal basis for its military intervention. The United States falsely claimed that Iraq possessed chemical weapons of mass destruction. After occupying Iraq, however, the United States found no evidence to prove that Iraq could produce chemical weapons of mass destruction. The real purpose of the United States in fabricating this lie was to control Iraq’s oil resources by military means.

The United States has consistently emphasized that its own interests should take first place and that its military advantages are not to be challenged. Although its economic strength has declined in relative terms, the United States is still expanding its arsenal and substantially increasing its defense spending. Since the Cold War, the United States has continued to create various military threats and pressures in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. To consolidate its hegemonic status, the United States has advocated and promoted NATO’s eastward expansion, with the goal of including all the Central and Eastern European countries in NATO’s sphere of influence and thus constricting Russia’s strategic space. In the Middle East, the United States aims to subvert the legitimate regimes of countries such as Syria and Iran by military means, and to support “color revolutions” in the region. In Asia in recent times, Washington has heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula and has also implemented its “Indo-Pacific strategy” aimed at containing China. The U.S. “Indian strategy” is serving to reveal the identity of its military allies and partners. Allies of the United States include Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand, and its claimed “partners” include Singapore, Taiwan (China), New Zealand, Mongolia; a number of South Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Nepal; and various Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The United States further proposes to strengthen its cooperation with Brunei, Laos, and Cambodia. In addition, it will work together with traditional allies such as Britain, France, and Canada to protect so-called Indo-Pacific freedom and openness.74

With the increase in China’s national strength, various U.S. scholars have been eager to invoke the Thucydides trap, claiming that it is difficult for Sino-U.S. relations to escape from this logic. But the truth, as China’s president Xi Jinping has pointed out, is that there is currently no Thucydides trap. Such a trap might, however, be created if the United States and its allies repeatedly make strategic miscalculations involving great powers.75 It may be asserted that it is the military hegemony and fraud of the United States that provides the root cause of the widespread instability, constant local wars, rise of war threats, and refugee crises around the world.

Neoimperialism Is a Parasitic and Decaying Late Imperialism

As Lenin stated,

Imperialism is an immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries.… Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by “clipping coupons,” who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.76

In the era of neoimperialism, the number of rentiers is increasing sharply, and the nature of the rentier countries is becoming more pronounced. The parasitism and decay of a small number of capitalist countries is further worsened, as can be seen specifically in the following aspects.

First, the United States employs its military, intellectual property, political, and cultural hegemony, as well as the U.S. dollar, to plunder the wealth of the world, especially that of developing countries. The United States is the world’s largest parasitic and decaying country. As evidence of this, we may take the trade between China and the United States. China sells to the United States goods produced by cheap labor, land, and environmental resources. The United States does not need to produce anything in order to buy these goods; it can simply print banknotes. With the money earned, China can then buy only virtual assets such as U.S. treasury bonds, and provide finance for U.S. consumer lending and outward expansion. The United States exports to China securities to which value cannot be added, while China exports to the United States mainly physical goods and labor services. The National Health Report released by the National Health Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences shows that the United States is the country with the most hegemonic dividends in the world, due to the position of its currency, while China is the country with the largest loss of hegemonic dividends. For the year 2011, U.S. hegemonic dividends totaled $7396.09 billion, corresponding to 52.38 percent of the country’s GDP, and the average hegemonic dividends obtained per day came to $20.263 billion. Meanwhile, the sum lost by China totaled $3663.4 billion. In terms of labor time, about 60 percent of the working hours of the Chinese workforce were effectively given without recompense to serve international monopoly capital.77

Second, military spending has increased, which in turn increases the burden on working-class people. Neoimperialism leads and promotes military-related scientific and technological research, the development of advanced weapons, and the expansion of military production. As the People’s Daily observed in 2016, “the military-industrial complex supported by monopoly capital and the cultural hegemony formed on the basis of colonialism have prompted the western countries to intervene in other countries’ affairs at their will.”78 Neoimperialism has thus become the initiator of regional turmoil and instability, and the engine of war. Over the past thirty years, the United States has spent $14.2 trillion on waging thirteen wars.79 Meanwhile, lack of money hinders improvements to the living conditions of the U.S. people in areas such as medical insurance. Exorbitant military spending has become a heavy burden on the country and its people, while the parasitic monopolies in the arms industry have reaped immense profits. According to statistics of the British Institute for International Strategic Studies, official U.S. military expenditures in 2018 came to $643 billion, and in 2019 will reach $750 billion, more than the sum of the military spending of the world’s eight next largest military powers. Since the end of the first Cold War, the United States has launched or participated in six major conflicts: The Gulf War (1991), Kosovo War (1999), Afghanistan War (2001), Iraq War (2003), Libya War (2011), and Syria War (2011).80 The addiction of monopoly capitalism to war is a manifestation of its parasitic and decaying nature. This barbaric characteristic of the system runs counter to civilization and threatens the shared future of the human community. It proves that neoimperialism is the primary root of war.

Third, wealth and incomes are concentrated in the hands of a specific class of owners of financial assets, as reflected in the 1 percent versus the 99 percent formulation. At the neoimperialist stage, the socialization, informatization, and internationalization of production have reached unprecedented levels, and the ability of human beings to create wealth is many times greater than in the old imperialist period. Nevertheless, the advance of productivity that is supposed to be a common gain for humankind has mainly benefited the financial oligarchy. “The bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation,” one observer notes.81 In 2001, for example, the financial wealth (excluding property rights) held by the wealthiest 1 percent of the U.S. population was four times greater than that of the poorest 80 percent. The 1 percent held assets on the stock market of $1.9 trillion, roughly equivalent to the value of the stock held by the other 99 percent.82

Fourth, monopoly hinders technological innovation, slowing its advance. The greed and parasitism of financial monopoly capital make its attitude to technological innovation ambivalent. Monopoly capital relies on technological innovation to maintain its monopoly status, but the high profits that result from this status mean that monopoly capital shows a certain inertia in promoting innovation. Even if many advanced functions of mobile phones are successfully developed in the same year, the monopoly producers of mobile phones will divide up these functions to be introduced and promoted over several years. The purpose is to ensure that consumers will continuously purchase mobile phones with new functions, allowing the corporations to obtain high monopoly profits every year.

Fifth, the tendency for monopoly capital and its agents to cause decay in the mass movement is becoming more serious. Lenin observed that “in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.”83 Neoimperialism divides the working class, striking at and weakening the labor unions using the excuse provided by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tremendous changes in Eastern Europe. It also uses its monopoly profits to buy the support of individuals, and fosters opportunist and neoliberal forces within the workers’ movement and various other mass movements. The results of such ploys include the downturn in size and activity of labor unions and other progressive movements, the low ebb of the world socialist movement, and a more obvious and serious tendency for workers to worship the forces of neoimperialism or to be intimidated by them.

Neoimperialism Is a Transitional and Moribund Late Capitalism

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism has revealed the transitional and moribund nature of monopoly capitalism for more than a century. However, except in a very small number of countries where socialism is being constructed, most capitalist societies have not perished. They have in fact achieved varying levels of development, and will continue to develop. This raises a very important question: How do we judge the transitional nature of contemporary capitalism, or its tendency to decline and perish? If we use the historical materialist method, the transitional nature of neoimperialism can be characterized on the basis of two points. First, like everything in the world, the neoimperialist system is constantly changing. It is a transient phenomenon in human history, and is not eternal. Second, there are reasons to believe that neoimperialism can eventually transition into socialism through various forms of revolutionary struggle.

In the era of neoimperialism, the developed capitalist countries have undergone many important technological and institutional reforms, which have provided the basis for a certain further development of capitalism and have delayed its demise. High and low growth rates continue to succeed each other, and the period of decay mentioned by Lenin has been greatly extended. This is because the capitalist countries have made many adjustments to their production relations and superstructure, including a degree of macroeconomic regulation, improvements to income distribution and social security, and so forth. In particular, there is no doubt that for the developed capitalist countries the advantages of economic globalization outweigh its disadvantages. Within the process of economic globalization, the powerful developed capitalist countries occupy an absolutely dominant position, through which they set out to maximize the benefits they receive. Their general drive to extend globalization in order to expand their markets does not, however, exclude the possibility of particular countries temporarily reversing the process in response to domestic crises, or as part of efforts to damage commercial competitors. “In the past two years,” a 2019 study notes, “the Trump administration has deepened its reverse globalization trend in the light of the domestic crisis. It adheres to the principle of ‘America first,’ and provokes international economic and trade disputes, trying to get rid of and pass on the domestic crisis.”84 The purpose of the United States in adopting a range of protectionist anti-globalization measures is to alleviate the domestic difficulties and crises it encounters within economic globalization, so as to advance its hegemonic interests.

Meanwhile, there is no essential conflict between the fact that neoimperialism and capitalism can look forward to existing and developing for some time to come, and the fact that a transition to a higher social formation is practically inevitable, provided that these societies do not degenerate into barbarism. The classic Marxist writers avoided setting out a specific timetable for the demise of capitalism and imperialism. Lenin’s scientific judgment is that “imperialism is a decaying but not completely decaying capitalism, a moribund but not dead capitalism.”85 He foresaw that moribund capitalism was very likely to drag out its existence for a prolonged period. Nor, on the basis of a comprehensive analysis, could it be denied that capitalism would see some kind of development even during its moribund stage. Discussing the decay of imperialism, Lenin stated: “It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not.… On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (England).”86

John Bellamy Foster also stressed that, “to say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and disintegration is imminent. It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to being a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century.”87

The basic contradictions of capitalism still exist and continue to develop. Likewise, the law of capitalist accumulation still exists and continues to develop. At the point when monopoly capitalism was coming into existence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the law of uneven economic and political development of imperialism made it possible for the revolution against capitalism to be victorious initially in one or several countries, before eventually spreading globally.

Decades after The Communist Manifesto proclaimed that capitalism would inevitably expire and Capital declared that the death knell of capitalist private ownership was about to ring, the October Revolution brought the downfall of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Then, the proletarian party led by Mao Zedong in China ended the semicolonial and semifeudal society ruled by the Kuomintang (Mao stated that China represented a feudal and comprador monopoly capitalism after the Second World War). The Soviet Communist Party led by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin consciously betrayed Marxism-Leninism, resulting in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist countries, with the exception of Belarus, regressing to capitalism. This demonstrates the twists, turns, and general difficulties experienced by the development of socialism and its economic system. But it cannot change the nature and general trend of the historical process.

China’s position on the main international fault lines is clear. In October 1984, Deng Xiaoping stated: “There are two major problems in the world that are very prominent. One is the issue of peace and the other is the North-South issue. There are many other issues, which are not of the same underlying importance or global and strategic significance as these two.” In March 1990, he reiterated: “As for the two major issues of peace and development, the peace issue has not been resolved, and the development issue has become more serious.”88 Deng emphasized that “peace and development” were the two major questions to be resolved.89

Based on the analysis of the character of neoimperialism, it can thus be concluded that neoimperialism represents a new phase of international monopoly into which capitalism develops after passing through the stages of free competitive capitalism, general private monopoly, and state monopoly. In addition, neoimperialism represents a new expansion of international monopoly capitalism, as well as a new system through which a minority of developed countries dominate the world and implement a new policy of economic, political, cultural, and military hegemony. If we examine the current situation on the basis of the international forces of justice and the development of the twists and turns of the international class struggle, the twenty-first century is a new era in which the world working class and the masses can carry out great revolutions and safeguard world peace; in which the socialist countries can carry out great feats of construction and promote ecological civilization; and in which progressive nations can work together to build a community with a shared future for humankind, a world in which neoimperialism and international capitalism gradually make way for global socialism.

Notes

1. ↩ I. Lenin, Selected Works: One Volume Edition (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 232–33.

2. ↩ I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 105.

3. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Late Imperialism,” Monthly Review 71, no. 3 (July–August 2019): 1–19.

4. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2013 (Geneva: United Nations, 2013).

5. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2018 (Geneva: United Nations, 2018).

6. ↩ Richard Dobbs et al., Playing to Win: The New Global Competition for Corporate Profits (New York: McKinsey & Company, 2015).

7. ↩ Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, in Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 41.

8. ↩ ETC Group, Breaking Bad: Big Ag Mega-Mergers in Play. Dow-DuPont in the Pocket? Next: Demonsanto? (Val-David, Quebec: ETC Group, 2015).

9. ↩ Wang Shaoguang, Wang Hongchuan, and Wei Xing, “Soybean Story: How Capital Threatens Human Security” [in Chinese], Open Times 3 (2013).

10. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 7-8.

11. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 201.

12. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 190.

13. ↩ Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, “The Network of Global Corporate Control,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 10 (2011): e25995.

14. ↩ Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso, 2006).

15. ↩ Ryan Isakson, “Food and Finance: The Financial Transformation of Agro-Food Supply Chains,” Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 5 (2014): 749–75.

16. ↩ William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review (September 2014).

17. ↩ Thomas I. Palley, “Financialization: What It Is and Why It Matters” (Levy Economics Institute, Working Paper No. 525, December 2007), 19.

18. ↩ Huang, Yiyi, “The Origin and Development of the Maximization of the Shareholder Value” [in Chinese], New Finance Economics 7 (2004).

19. ↩ Erdogan Bakir and Al Campbell, “Neoliberalism, the Rate of Profit and the Rate of Accumulation,” Science & Society 74, no. 3 (2010): 323–42.

20. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 212.

21. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism,” Monthly Review 63, no. 6 (November 2011): 3.

22. ↩ Imperialist rent is the result of the differential in the prices of labor power of equal productivity. Samir Amin, “The Surplus in Monopoly Capitalism and the Imperialist Rent,” Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July–August 2012): 83.

23. ↩ Cui Xuedong, “Is the Contemporary Capitalist Crisis a Minsky-Type Crisis or a Marxist Crisis?” [in Chinese], Studies on Marxism 9 (2018).

24. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, R. Jamil Jonna, and Brett Clark, “The Contagion of Capital,” Monthly Review 72, no. 8 (January 2021): 9.

25. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2018.

26. ↩ Cheng Enfu and Hou Weimin, “The Root of the Western Financial Crisis Lies in the Intensification of the Basic Contradiction of Capitalism” [in Chinese], Hongqi Wengao 7 (2018).

27. ↩ Lu Baolin, “Criticism and Reflection of the Supplyism of the ‘Reagan Revolution’ and ‘Thatcher’s New Deal’: In the Perspective of the Relations between Labor and Capital of Marxist Economics” [in Chinese], Contemporary Economic Research 6 (2016).

28. ↩ “How Powerful Is the ‘Goldman Sachs Gang’ in Influencing U.S. Politics?” [in Chinese], Global Times, January 18, 2017.

29. ↩ Chen Jianqi, “On the Issue of the Contemporary Counter-globalization and Its Response” [in Chinese], Science of Leadership Forum 10 (2017); He Bingmeng, Liu Rongcang, and Liu Shucheng, Asian Financial Crisis: Analysis and Countermeasures [in Chinese] (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2007), 66.

30. ↩ Yang Yunxia, “The New Demonstrations of Capitalist Intellectual Property Monopoly and its Essence” [in Chinese], Studies on Marxism 3 (2019).

31. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 223.

32. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 230.

33. ↩ Lv Youzhi and Zha Junhong, “The Evolution and Influence of the G7 Group after the Cold War” [in Chinese], Chinese Journal of European Studies 6 (2002).

34. ↩ Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

35. ↩ Li Qiqing, “Neoliberalism Against Globalization” [in Chinese], Marxism & Reality 5 (2003).

36. ↩ Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

37. ↩ He, Liu, and Liu, Asian Financial Crisis, 84, 91.

38. ↩ Liu Zhenxia, “NATO’s New Strategy is the Embodiment of American Hegemony,” Social Sciences Journal of Universities in Shanxi 3 (1999).

39. ↩ Liu, “NATO’s New Strategy is the Embodiment of American Hegemony.”

40. ↩ “Pompeo Threatened That the United States Is Establishing a New Global Order Against China and Russia,” Guancha, December 5, 2018.

41. ↩ Liu, “NATO’s New Strategy is the Embodiment of American Hegemony.”

42. ↩ Wang Yan, “Review of Research on the Index System of Cultural Soft Power” [in Chinese], Research on Marxist Culture 1 (2019).

43. ↩ Hao Shucui, “Making the Socialist Culture with Chinese Characteristics Blossom in the Contemporary World Cultural Garden: An Interview with Professor Wang Weiguang, Member of the Standing Committee of CPPCC, Director of the Committee on Nationalities and Religion” [in Chinese], Research on Marxist Culture 1 (2018).

44. ↩ “Iranian Officials Slammed Hollywood Movies and Called them ‘Airfone,’” Huanqiu, February 3, 2012.

45. ↩ Xiao Li, “Talks of the American Politicians and Strategists on the Export of Ideology and Values” [in Chinese], World Socialism Studies 2 (2016).

46. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 248.

47. ↩ Cheng Enfu and Li Linan, “Marxism and Its Localized Theories in China Are the Soul and Core of Soft Power” [in Chinese], Research on Marxist Culture 1 (2019).

48. ↩ Cheng Enfu, “The New Era Will Accelerate the Process to Enrich People and Strengthen the Country,” Journal of the Central Institute of Socialism 1 (2018).

49. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62, no. 11 (2011): 1.

50. ↩ Foster, McChesney, and Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” 11.

51. ↩ Li Shenming, “Finance, Technology, Culture, and Military Hegemony Are New Features of Today’s Capital Empire” [in Chinese], Hongqi Wengao 20 (2012).

52. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Trade and Development Report 2017 (Geneva: United Nations, 2017).

53. ↩ “Global 500, 2018,” Fortune, accessed March 23, 2021.

54. ↩ Li Chong’s research also shows that the rate of surplus value increased. According to his calculations, from 1982 to 2006 the variable capital of U.S. corporations increased from $1,505.616 billion to $6,047.461 billion, a rise of 301.66 percent. Meanwhile, surplus value increased from $674.706 billion to $3,615.262 billion, a rise of 435.83 percent. Li Chong, “Marx’s Law of the Falling Rate of Profit: Analysis and Verification” [in Chinese], Contemporary Economic Research 8 (2018).

55. ↩ Lu Baolin, “Labor Squeeze and Profit Rate Recovery: A Discussion of the Neoliberal Accumulation System of Globalization and Financialization” [in Chinese], Teaching and Research 2 (2018).

56. ↩ Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, “The Long Roots of the Present Crisis: Keynesians, Austerians, and Marx’s Law,” World Review of Political Economy 4, no. 1 (2013): 86–115.

57. ↩ Xie Chang’an, “Research on the Evolution of International Competition Patterns in the Age of Financial Capital” [in Chinese], World Socialism Study 1 (2019).

58. ↩ Facundo Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018 (Berkeley: World Inequality Lab, 2017), 15.

59. ↩ Wang Zhiqiang, “International Transfer of Surplus Value and the Change of the General Profit Rate: Based on the Empirical Evidence of 41 Countries” [in Chinese], Journal of World Economy 11 (2018).

60. ↩ “GDP Ranking,” World Bank, accessed March 23, 2021.

61. ↩ Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report 2013 (Zurich: Credit Suisse, 2013).

62. ↩ Tom O’Connor, “China Responds to Iran Capturing ‘U.S. Spies’: Remember When Mike Pompeo Said CIA Lies, Cheats and Steals?,” Newsweek, July 23, 2019.

63. ↩ To cheat is to deceive people by using false words and deeds to conceal the truth. Fraud, which is even worse, involves deceptive acts committed by deceitful means. It refers to behavior intended to create confusion and misunderstanding.

64. ↩ Matthew J. Belvedere, “Larry Summers Praises China’s State Investment in Tech, Saying It Doesn’t Need to Steal from US,” CNBC, June 27, 2018.

65. ↩ Zhu Changsheng, “The Real Purpose of the West Collectively Shaming Russia Finally Surfaces” [in Chinese], Kunlunce, April 12, 2018.

66. ↩ Mike Pence, “Remarks by Vice President Pence to Migrant Community at the Santa Catarina Shelter,” U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Brazil, June 27, 2018.

67. ↩ “Stupid to Regard One Civilization as Exceptional,” China Daily, May 22, 2019.

68. ↩ Zhang Yang and Yuan Yuan, “To What Extent Does American Culture Affect China?” [in Chinese], People’s Tribune 7 (2017): 131–33.

69. ↩ Zhang and Yuan, “To What Extent Does American Culture Affect China?”

70. ↩ Shen Yi, “The Debate on Principles of Global Cyberspace Governance and China’s Strategic Choice” [in Chinese], Foreign Affairs Review 2 (2015): 65–79.

71. ↩ Yang Minqing, “Decoding US Cyber Hegemony: the ‘Victim of Cyber War’ Owns 100,000 Network Soldiers” [in Chinese], Global View, 2015.

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Connecting the Dots: Iran, China, and the Challenge to U.S. Hegemony

By Qiao Collective

Originally published at Qiao Collective's website.

The renewed threat of outright war with Iran in the first weeks of 2020 has remobilized the U.S. anti-war left. On January 3, the U.S. deployed a targeted drone to assassinate high-ranking Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq. One day after, thousands of protesters rallied in dozens of American cities following a call for a day of action from the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). Meanwhile, Democrats offered tepid criticism despite just weeks prior voting to approve President Trump’s massive $738 billion military budget and rejecting an amendment introduced by Reps. Khanna (D-CA) and Sanders (D-VT) that would have cut off funding for executive military action in Iran or elsewhere without Congressional approval.

Amidst these leftist and liberal contestations and despite a retaliatory Iranian missile strike on a U.S. base in Iraq, President Trump called for diplomacy and claimed the U.S. “is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.” The threat of further U.S. military action in Iran may be receding for the short-term. But the reality is that the U.S. was at war with Iran far before the strike on Soleimani—just not employing tactics of war recognized by many as such. Since the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and reinstated sanctions on Iran that November, the U.S. has recommitted to a “hybrid war” designed to cripple Iran’s economy and cut off the nation from international trade. This concept of hybrid war—which deploys disinformation, economic sanctions and coercion, and political manipulation to further U.S. interests without the use of military intervention—is crucial for understanding U.S. aggression against Iran and its significance in the larger world system.

The aim of renewed U.S. sanctions on Iran is clear: as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it, they seek to “starve the regime,” “accelerate the rapid decline” of its international trade, and “restore democracy.” Not only do the unilateral sanctions blacklist 50 Iranian banks and hundreds of individuals, vessels, aircraft and Iran’s energy sector, they aim to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero by wielding the U.S.’s global economic dominance and threatening to penalize foreign corporations and states that continue to do business with Iran. As Pompeo warned: "If a company evades our sanctions regime and secretly continues" to do business with Iran, "the United States will levy severe, swift penalties on it, including potential sanctions." The impact of this U.S. abuse of power is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis: food prices quickly skyrocketed after the announcement of renewed sanctions, and testimonials from Iranian students, doctors, patients, and others have described severe limitations on access to education, medicine, and health care under U.S. sanctions. In a talk on security issues in Ufa, Russia, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani rightly described U.S. sanctions as a violation of national sovereignty and a form of “economic terrorism.”

So why escalate military action when sanctions imposed by the U.S. and enforced by international financial organizations have already ravaged Iran’s economy? One partial answer is Iran’s deepening ties to China, whose injection of capital and pledges of military support have been a lifeline to a politically-isolated Tehran. The U.S. has become increasingly threatened by a new global political alliance led by China, Iran, and Russia and including countries like Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba. Strengthened through years of meticulous economic, military, and political cooperation and forged under shared circumstances of victimization by antagonistic U.S. foreign policy, this power bloc threatens to challenge U.S. hegemony over the global order.

First and foremost, Chinese-Iranian economic agreements have undermined U.S. sanctions and integrated Iran into a Chinese-led Eurasian economic zone which the U.S. deems an imminent threat. In 2016, Iranian President Hassan Rohani announced during a visit from China’s President Xi Jinping that Iran and China had created a $600 billion dollar, 25-year political and trade alliance. During Xi’s visit, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated, "Tehran seeks cooperation with more independent countries" because "Iranians never trusted the West." The landmark deal made explicit that China provides knowledge-sharing and will assist in building critical infrastructure such as hospitals, railways, and roads in Iran. In September of 2019, the two countries updated the 2016 agreement which would include a $400 billion investment focused in Iran’s oil, gas, and infrastructure sectors—renewed U.S. sanctions be damned. Meanwhile, since early 2019 Chinese and Iranian officials announced their joint cooperation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive trillion dollar trade and infrastructure project linking markets in East and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. (Iraq also announced its intention to join BRI in 2019, to the dismay of U.S. strategists.) China has even gone as far as to turn off its oil ships’ radar and sonar technology when entering the Persian Gulf in order to avoid U.S. military detection and further punishment for “violating” U.S. sanctions. Amidst U.S. aggression against Iran and crippling sanctions that target medical supplies and kills countless Iranians, the political alliance and trade deal serves as a crucial lifeline for Iran and its people, providing the material basis for what Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif praised as China and Iran’s shared vision of sovereignty, peace, and mutual progress.

While China has proven an invaluable ally to Iran and its people, Iran—as an oil-rich nation located at the center of BRI’s trade route—also presents a strategic ally for China. Shut out of Western financial markets, Iran has turned to China as an economic partner. And unlike U.S. economic terrorism designed to undermine political autonomy in Iran, the $400 billion Chinese-Iranian deal simply gives Chinese state-owned firms the right of first refusal for Iranian petrochemical projects. (Ironically, the U.S. media insists that only one of these economic policies is predatory.) Given the U.S. government’s grave trepidations about BRI’s potential to decenter U.S. global economic hegemony, it would make sense that the U.S. seek ways to undermine Iranian-Chinese cooperation. U.S. leaders have already pressured allies in Europe and Asia to spurn Chinese investment and threatened to stop intelligence sharing with allies that accept Chinese Huawei 5G technology. Despite itself controlling world financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank whose structural adjustment loans have forcibly privatized and destabilized developing economies across the world, the U.S. has decried China’s “predatory approach to investment” and warned allies to choose sides.

But Iran’s ties to U.S. rivals such as China and Russia are not solely economic. Just days before the Solemaini assassination, Iran, China, and Russia held joint naval drills in the Gulf of Oman, a “normal military exchange” that reflected the nations’ “will and capabilities to jointly maintain world peace and maritime security,” Chinese defense spokesman Wu Qian said. Commander of the Iranian Navy Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi stated that the U.S. and some of its allied nations staged a failed military attempt to sabotage the joint naval exercise. And on January 6, Iraq’s Prime Minister welcomed Chinese ambassador Zhang Tao, who conveyed Beijing’s readiness to provide military assistance amidst U.S. refusals to cooperate with Iraqi parliament’s demands to withdraw.

Disappointingly, China’s consistent support for victims of U.S. economic terrorism has gone largely unnoticed by self-described Western leftists. The U.S. left in particular has failed to advance a systematic analysis that places U.S. aggression in Bolivia, Venezuela, Iran, and Iraq in relation, instead defaulting to a reactive, case-by-case resistance to various coups, air strikes, and aggressions as they occur. While U.S. anti-war advocates have quickly mobilized to respond to overt forms of imperial intervention—the use of military violence in Iran or its staging of the 2019 Bolivian coup, for instance—it has failed to connect the dots between these individual cases and the emergence of a global power bloc challenging U.S. hegemony, of which China plays a key and consistent role. Indeed, China has provided a recurring economic, political, and military lifeline to nations such as Venezuela (where China remains a major buyer of oil despite U.S. sanctions), Bolivia (where Evo Morales’ government spurned Western transnational companies to partner with Chinese state-owned firms to nationalize Bolivia’s lithium industry), and North Korea (where China provides crucially-needed food aid and has advocated for an easing of U.S. sanctions) as these nations have attempted to survive U.S. sanctions, expel Western capital, nationalize key industries, and chart an independent course from the U.S. world order.

The U.S. left’s inability to understand China as a proven ally for nations struggling under the boot of U.S. empire is a massive strategic failure. Instead, U.S. progressives invoke “both sides” false equivalencies that equate a real and hegemonic U.S. global power structure with the vague, potential specter of “Chinese imperialism.” Under such an argument, Chinese economic lifelines provided to Iran, Venezuela, and other nations cut out of global markets by U.S. sanctions are simply an opportunistic power play, one which would replace these nations’ subjugation under Western imperial power under a new, ostensibly equally brutal, Chinese power. The fact that such facile elisions have found a foothold amongst the U.S. left has proven to be a critical weakness in its ability to mount more than a purely reactive response to present U.S. aggression. Certainly, skeptics will argue that China benefits from its economic ties to vulnerable victims of U.S. aggression, but that ignores both the obvious facts that mutual benefit is the foundation of all international relations, and that China has been consistently targeted with U.S. secondary sanctions, propaganda, and fear mongering for its audacity to challenge U.S. policy in the Middle East, Latin America and beyond. The U.S. left’s failure to challenge—and indeed its tendency to repeat—antagonistic rhetoric against China is fundamentally contradictory to its stated solidarity with nations such as Iran, Bolivia, and Venezuela.

Notions that China is seeking to “unfairly” benefit from brutal U.S. sanctions on nations like Iran miss the fact that the U.S. is escalating its own kind of hybrid warfare against China to punish China for daring to “violate” U.S. sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. has repeatedly en-masse sanctioned Chinese companies and banks, both private and state-owned, for providing trade and aid to Iranian entities. Indeed, the so-called U.S.-China “trade war,” despite receiving little attention from the left, is part and parcel of U.S. attempts to undermine China’s ability to provide assistance to Iran and other targets of U.S. hybrid warfare. With its explicit goals of undermining Chinese state economic control, privatizing key industries, and forcing China to remove restrictions on foreign capital and company ownership, the trade war threatens to destabilize China’s role as an economic lifeline for Iran, Venezuela, and the rest of the Global South. The finance, oil, and mining industries—key targets for privatization under trade war negotiations—are crucial to China’s ability to purchase Iranian oil and assist Latin American countries in providing alternatives to Western capital investment from their mining and natural resources industries. Without full state control over its finance, oil, and mining industries, China may lose control of these industries to Western companies and could ultimately lose the ability to act swiftly and leverage those industries to defy U.S. sanctions on oil and mining industries of Global South nations like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Iran. As U.S. media celebrate China’s slowing economy and the material harm the trade war is causing Chinese people while salivating over the prospect of U.S. financial dominance over Chinese markets, it is becoming clear that a likely goal of the U.S. is to use the trade war not only to “open” China’s state-owned domestic industries to Western investment, but also to undermine its leadership of the only geopolitical bloc that poses a real challenge to U.S. global hegemony.

What’s more, the U.S. has used feigned concerns over human rights abuses as a trojan horse for its regime of sanctions against supposed “rogue states.” Seemingly progressive bills such as the Hong Kong Freedom and Democracy Act, which received near-unanimous bipartisan support in the U.S. House and Senate, include provisions that would mandate Hong Kong abide by U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea, while giving cover to further sanction Chinese individuals and firms and ban Chinese actors from entering the U.S. The sole opposition in the House came from Thomas Massie (R-KY), who stated his consistent opposition to sanctions which “[meddle] in the internal affairs of foreign countries” and “invites those governments to meddle in our affairs.” Supported widely by proclaimed progressive and leftist groups in the U.S., the legislation provides a textbook example of how the U.S. uses the language of democracy and human rights abroad as cover for retaliation against geopolitical rivals and to further its own human rights abuses through punishing sanctions.

It is important to note that this economic warfare has been coupled with the quiet escalation of the Obama era “pivot to Asia,” which sought to contain China’s rising influence through military and economic policy. The head of the Pentagon has called China his new “top priority,” and in January 2020, the U.S. Army announced two new regional task forces that would combat the “strategic threat” of China through a focus on “non-conventional warfare” to create an “asymmetrical advantage” for the U.S. in the event of military conflict. The Department of Defense had previously designated the Pacific as its “priority theater,” and conducts routine military drills in Japan and South Korea while selling $2 billion in arms to Taiwan in 2019 alone. This escalation of U.S. military power in Asia under the rationale of “containing China” makes clear that opposing U.S. antagonism towards China is paramount for future hopes of peace and demilitarization in Asia and the Pacific.

In order to mount a serious challenge to American empire, the U.S. anti-war movement must understand the terms of engagement: economic terrorism through sanctions and political isolation and destabilization have become the primary modes of U.S. imperialism. Often obscured by overt acts of military violence, U.S. hybrid warfare waged against not only Iran but Venezuela, Bolivia, North Korea, and China is the primary contradiction facing the global struggle against imperialism. For too long, U.S. critics of American empire have evaded the derisively termed “China question” in favor of false equivalences and the repetition of U.S. state talking points. But behind the Cold War rhetoric, China has proven itself as a strategic ally for countless nations with which U.S. leftists claim solidarity. Whether the U.S. anti-war movement will rise to oppose increasing aggression against China designed to undermine its ability to support Iran, Bolivia, North Korea, and all victims of U.S. imperialism remains to be seen.

Qiao is a collective of Chinese leftists living in the diaspora. They may be followed on Twitter @qiaocollective

China's Rise Threatens U.S. Imperialism, Not American People

By Ajit Singh

This year marks the 40th anniversary of China's "reform and opening up," initiated in 1978. At that time, although living standards had significantly improved following the socialist revolution in 1949- life expectancy nearly doubling in the first 30 years -China still faced tremendous challenges. Seeking to overcome the country's severe underdevelopment, the West's monopoly over technology, and the isolation to which it had been subjected to during the Cold War by the United States, China implemented reforms in order to promote economic growth and development. Deng Xiaoping, chief architect of the policy, summed up the Communist Party's thinking in three simple clauses: "Our country must develop. If we do not develop then we will be bullied. Development is the only hard truth."

Four decades later, the success of reform is undeniable: China has lifted 800 million people out poverty-more than the rest of the world combined during the same period-and generated "the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history," according to the World Bank . China's GDP growth has averaged nearly 10 percent a year over a 40-year period, without crises, with the country becoming a world leader in science , technology and innovation . Rising from extreme poverty to international power, China now has the world's second largest economy, and is generally expected to overtake the U.S. in GDP terms within the next two decades . Measured in terms of purchasing power parity, China's economy has already surpassed the U.S.

When beginning its reform, China sought to "keep a low profile" and "bide its time, while building up strength" , as the U.S. led an international offensive, destructively imposing neoliberalism on countries throughout the global South. Today, we are in the midst of a turning point. Announcing to the world that it is entering a "new era" at last year's National Congress of the Communist Party, China is playing a more assertive and leading role in global affairs. The country's trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative-called " the largest single infrastructure program in human history "-involves over 70 countries and 1,700 development projects connecting Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Meanwhile, mired in economic stagnation and decline, the U.S. is its losing international authority. In particular, during the "America First"-era, the country's reputation has plummeted , as the Trump administration unilaterally withdraws from international institutions and agreements , displays open bigotry towards developing countries, and eschews diplomacy for insulting arrogance and genocidal threats .

U.S. hostility towards China increases

That China and the U.S. are moving in opposite directions is not a new phenomenon, but this trend has been brought into sharp focus under Trump. Growing anxious about its diminishing global dominance, the U.S. demonstrates increasing hostility towards China. In a series of recent policy statements - the National Security Strategy , National Defense Strategy , Nuclear Posture Review , and State of the Union address - the Trump administration has repeatedly identified the "threat" posed by "economic and military ascendance" of China, declaring that "[i]nter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security." It is claimed that China, along with Russia, "want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests."

In response to this "danger," the Trump administration is pursuing a substantial buildup in U.S. military forces, viewing "more lethal" and "unmatched power [as] the surest means of our defense." Trump's 2019 budget proposes a massive increase in Pentagon spending to $716 billion and he has assembled a war cabinet to make use of it, including extreme hawks and noted anti-China hardliners such as John Bolton , Mike Pompeo and Peter Navarro . These moves come after top U.S. military officer, General Joseph Dunford, called China the country's "greatest threat" and U.S. Pacific Commander Admiral Harry Harris, new ambassador to Australia, told Congress in February that the U.S. must prepare for war with China . Washington is increasing military pressure on Beijing: ratcheting up tensions on the Korean peninsula; taking steps to construct a "quadrilateral" alliance with right-wing governments in India, Japan and Australia, targeting China; and passing the Taiwan Travel Act which violates the "One China" policy and encourages the U.S. "to send senior officials to Taiwan to meet Taiwanese counterparts and vice versa."

On the economic front, the Trump administration seeks to launch a "trade war" with Beijing and form a broad anti-China alliance , proposing $50 billion in tariffs targeting Chinese imports (and threatening $100 billion more ), launching an investigation into technology transfers to China, and lodging formal complaints at the World Trade Organization on "the state's pervasive role in the Chinese economy." Washington is increasingly regulating and monitoring inbound Chinese investment, outbound U.S. investment in China, and joint ventures. Viewing technological dominance as a pillar of its international authority, Washington considers China's development and technological advance to be an "existential economic threat."

As this animosity increases, U.S. rhetoric towards China calls to mind the virulent anti-communism of the Cold War and racist "yellow peril" phantoms of decades past. Newly appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently warned that China was trying "to infiltrate the United States with spies - with people who are going to work on behalf of the Chinese government against America … We see it in our schools. We see it in our hospitals and medicals systems. We see it throughout corporate America. It's also true in other parts of the world … including Europe and the UK." Similarly, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress in February that "the whole of Chinese society" is a threat to the U.S. That such belligerent statements can be made towards 1.4 billion people, one-fifth of humanity, without receiving any challenge from Democrats, Republicans or the corporate-owned media, is an indication of the consensus around the "China threat" theory in the U.S. establishment, and the danger this poses.

A new Cold War

Washington's hostility towards Beijing is rooted in the foundation of modern U.S. foreign policy. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and end of the Cold War, ushered in an era during which the U.S. has sought to establish unipolar global dominance. Explicitly outlined in a 1992 Defense Policy Guidance paper authored under neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, the principal objective of U.S. foreign policy in this period has been "to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival" capable of challenging U.S. aspirations for global hegemony. In the quarter-century since, the U.S. has aggressively pursued this aim, engaging in endless wars, "regime change" efforts, and military build-ups around the world, now operating over 900 military bases globally.

Despite these most destructive efforts, the U.S. has been unable to stop China's momentous rise, which has emerged as the primary obstacle to U.S. aims for unipolar dominance. Although Washington has sought regime change in Beijing ever since the socialist revolution of 1949, the U.S. has generally pursued a strategy of "containment through engagement" following the normalisation of bilateral relations in the 1970s. In part, Washington had hoped that China's economic reform and the fall of the Soviet Union would lead to political reform in Beijing and the abandonment of Communist Party leadership and socialism with Chinese characteristics, in favour of Western-oriented neoliberalism. History has confirmed that China has no such intention.

Recognizing its own declining leverage and that China will not become "more like us" , Washington is attempting to launch a new Cold War against China. The identification of China as the primary target of U.S. foreign policy originated during the Obama era with the "Asia pivot" seeking to encircle China, shifting 60 percent of U.S. naval assets to Asia by 2020. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton argued that the U.S. must reorient the focus of its foreign policy from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific to ensure "continued American leadership well into this century." The developments under Trump, mark an escalation of this bipartisan strategy.

The unipolar-multipolar struggle

The importance of U.S.-China relations cannot be overstated, with the two countries at the core of a broader unipolar-multipolar struggle over the shape of the international order. While the U.S. seeks to secure global dominance, China's rise is central to a multipolarisation trend, in which multiple centres of power are emerging to shape a negotiated, more democratic world.

China's political orientation has been fundamentally shaped by its history of subjugation to foreign powers during its "century of humiliation" and anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, China has always identified itself as part of the Third World or global South and the collective struggle of formerly colonized and oppressed nations against the global inequality wrought by imperialism.

Under the banner of "South-South cooperation", China continues to champion this collective struggle today, promoting greater say for developing countries in global governance and the construction of a rules-based international order in place of the unilateral actions of major powers, in particular the U.S. More than mere rhetoric, China provides crucial investment, infrastructure construction , technology transfers , debt forgiveness , and diplomatic support to developing countries. Most importantly, unlike the U.S. and West which engage in destructive foreign interventions, China abides by the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and does not impose conditions on its relations.

China's respect for the self-determination of other countries has made it an indispensable partner for nations resisting foreign domination and pursuing independent development, including Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, and North Korea. It is for this reason that the late Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro declared in 2004 that "China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries … an important element of balance, progress and safeguard of world peace and stability." Venezuelan foreign minister Jorge Arreaza echoed these sentiments last December, saying "Thank God humanity can count on China," as his country faces sanctions, economic sabotage, and threats of regime change from the U.S.

Contributing to the declining global authority of the U.S, China's international relations have prompted Washington to cynically accuse China of fostering dependency in Africa and being an "imperial power" towards Latin America . In fact, rather than behaving in a predatory manner, China provides sorely needed funding, on favorable terms, to African borrowers , and as we have seen above China supports Latin America's struggle against imperialism. That China is praised by fiercely independent nations of the global South and faces such charges from the U.S.-the most powerful empire in history-reveals the absurdity of such claims. Anxious about its own decline, the U.S. seeks to both drive a wedge between China and the South, and also restrict the right of developing nations to choose their own partners and path. China has demonstrated that its rise is compatible with the self-determination of other nations-whether capitalist or socialist; what it comes into contradiction with is U.S. imperialism.

It is important to recognize that U.S. hostility towards China is not simply a product of narrow competition with the Asian power, it is a resistance to the empowerment of the global South and democratization of international relations. China is the primary target of U.S. imperialism because of its strategic importance at the heart of the world multipolarisation trend, which threatens to bring an end to U.S. international supremacy and 500 years of Western global dominance.

An opportunity for ordinary Americans

For years, the U.S. political establishment has sought to leverage American workers in its struggle against China. Endless rhetoric about how China is "stealing U.S. jobs" seeks to stir up xenophobia and racism in order divert attention from the fact that it was Washington and U.S. corporations that implemented the neoliberal reforms which hollowed out America's economy. On a near daily basis, the corporate-owned media further promotes hostility towards China with hawkish, sensationalized and dishonest reporting. In recent months, Americans have been told that China, with its "model of totalitarianism for the 21st century" , "has a plan to rule the world" , that its "'long arm' of influence stretches ever further" , its "fingerprints are everywhere" as it "infiltrates" U.S. classrooms, colleges , and more. The message is clear: be afraid.

However, for ordinary Americans, multipolarity and the strengthening of international forces, like China, which challenge U.S. imperialism are not a threat. Instead, this offers the potential for progressive advances for the American people in their own struggles. The 20th century provides a historical precedent for this, where the existence of the Soviet Union and a concrete socialist alternative to capitalism along with the wave of Third World national liberation struggles, placed pressure on Western capitalist countries, including the U.S., to respond to their own people's demands for progressive social and economic policies, such as the welfare state, higher taxes on the wealthy, and anti-racist measures.

Similarly, today, as the U.S. and the world face tremendous social, economic and environmental challenges, Chinese socialism is demonstrating a concrete alternative to the dominant capitalist system: pledging to eradicate poverty by 2020 ; with wage growth soaring and real income for the bottom half of earners growing 401 percent since 1978 (compared to falling by one percent in the U.S. during that time); declaring healthcare to be a universal human right ; praised for having the "best response to the world's environmental crisis" and reducing pollution in cities by an average of 32% in just four years since declaring a "war on pollution"; becoming " a world leader in wind, solar, nuclear and electric vehicles" ; building the world's longest bullet-train network , spending more on infrastructure than the U.S. and Europe combined ; and announcing that inequality, not economic underdevelopment, is now the "principal contradiction" to be addressed in Chinese society.

China is able to prioritize social and environmental policies-while sustaining rapid, crisis-free economic growth for four decades-because, unlike the U.S., the interests of corporations and wealthy do not rise above political authority. China's wealthy regularly face severe repercussions for criminal behaviour (instead of bailouts). For example, an annual list of China's richest citizens is commonly called the "death list" or "kill pigs list" because those named are often later imprisoned or executed-according to one study 17% of the time.

While China is not a perfect society and continues to face many challenges, the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has been able to respond to a number of pressing issues facing the world today, better than the U.S. capitalist system. This is likely why China leads the world in optimism , with 87% feeling the country is headed in the right direction, compared to only 43% feeling the same in the U.S.

The new Cold War that Washington seeks to launch against China requires massive increases in military spending, paid for by ordinary Americans with massive cuts to already inadequate social programs, housing support and health care . If the American people can reject the Cold War mentality of their ruling class and arrogant notions of "American exceptionalism", China's rise could offer them the opportunity to learn how to build a society that better meets their needs.

This essay originally appeared at MRonline.