If one is committed to bringing total victory to the world’s workers, they’ll aid in the fight against U.S. hegemony. That means taking geopolitics seriously. That means recognizing how as inhabitants of the imperial center, we Americans have the ability to prevent our government from inflicting violence against the peoples who imperialism targets. When we mobilize against the sanctions on Cuba, the aid to Israel’s colonial war upon the Palestinians, or the aid to fascist Ukraine’s war on the Donbass, we’re weakening the war machine. This is because the war machine depends on the State Department’s view of global affairs being shared by the people. And the stronger the anti-war movement is, the less effective this narrative control becomes. At this stage in the decline of U.S. hegemony, the American anti-war movement’s purpose is to speed up that geopolitical shift by sabotaging the workings of American militarism.
The only way to do this, at least until we overthrow the bourgeois state which American militarism depends on, is by exposing imperialism’s narratives. To find precisely what lies these narratives consist of, look at which ideas you aren’t presently allowed to challenge: the NATO account of the actions of Serbia in the Yugoslav war, Assad’s supposed chemical attacks, the “Uyghur genocide,” the concept of north Korea as an undemocratic regime, the notion that Russia is a fascist state which acted against Ukraine unprovoked. Even though these things are easily able to be refuted, they still can’t be acceptably referred to as false, like the Iraq psyop can. This is because unlike Iraq, the Balkans, Syria, China, the DPRK, and Russia are still crucial for the imperialists to shape perceptions of. Iraq has long been spent as a narrative asset, and the empire has made it into one of the many places Washington wages war against unquestioned. The situation with the other named countries and areas is more fluid.
The empire still needs to perpetuate its decades-old mythology of atrocity propaganda against Serbia, so that it can continue its campaign to assimilate all of eastern Europe into the EU’s neoliberal model. It has to portray Washington’s greatest geopolitical rivals as representing a new “axis of evil” so that it can justify its efforts to destabilize Eurasia. Efforts which extend to not just the Ukraine proxy war, or the Taiwan provocations, but the Iran color revolution attempts. This mission of driving Eurasia to collapse also involves the Syria sanctions, which were designed to exacerbate emergencies like this month’s earthquake. Should the DPRK win the narrative war, Washington’s ongoing efforts to menace it with military exercises will become an international liability. So the imperialists have to keep playing the victim, portraying the country’s responsive missile tests as unprovoked threats from a “crazy dictator.”
As Washington’s new cold war develops, additional fronts within it are being opened up, many overlapping with others. The idea that Ethiopia’s government is committing a genocide against the Tigrayans, which obscures the context that Tigray’s people have been held hostage by the U.S.-backed TPLF terrorists, is essential for justifying the campaign to destabilize Ethiopia and Eritrea. A campaign that’s motivated by a desire to prevent further development of China’s BRI project, via destroying the states which have the most potential to advance the initiative. Washington’s operations to destabilize Afghanistan and Myanmar have the same goal, though the atrocity propaganda directed at them doesn’t need to be so extreme due to how they’re respectively governed by a theocratic regime and a military junta. The context that both countries have found themselves in such situations due to Washington’s own policies isn’t considered in our media’s analyses on them. The central objective of our foreign policy thinkers at this moment is to handicap China’s rise, and the economic uplifting of the peripheral countries that this rise is bringing about.
This great-power competition is where imperialism’s efforts are now concentrated within. No longer is Latin America the primary target, because with the economically desperate situation the Ukraine proxy war has created for the imperial powers, Washington sees that it must at least learn to coexist with the hemisphere’s anti-imperialist governments. Washington still carries out coups where it can, like last December’s one in Peru, but these regime change operations become less viable the more the region’s anti-imperialist movement gains strength. Even in Peru, the backlash from the people has already rendered the new coup regime’s survival uncertain. A speedily waning empire like Washington has to make compromises, in this case conceding the losses of several of its neo-colonies so that it can continue its drive to destabilize Eurasia.
The real trouble has come when the Russia sanctions have proven to be not effective enough to make the country collapse, and this goal of destroying Eurasia has therefore been revealed as unreachable. If the sanctions were that effective, Washington would feel comfortable with trying to carry out regime change against Lula for building strong ties with the PRC. But because the empire hasn’t managed to rally more than 20% of the globe’s countries around its war against Russia, and has consequently had to sacrifice American and European living standards to bolster the sanctions, Washington is losing the economic war. So it has no choice but to build or maintain economic relations with countries like Venezuela and Brazil, watching helplessly as they work to accelerate the transition to multipolarity.
The empire’s encouragements of new Balkan tensions, weaponization of Ukraine and Azerbaijan against other former Soviet states, and use of Israel as a regional terrorist proxy have not brought the empire victory on the Eurasian geopolitical chessboard. This is because the BRICs countries, which are far bigger and more economically pivotal than Washington’s destabilization proxies, have been strengthening their ties. Even ultra-nationalist India has been continuing to fortify its relations with Russia while de-escalating its border dispute with China, because it knows which path is in its best interests.
In this timeline where multipolarity has come even faster than the Pentagon was expecting it would, and this sudden hastening of history’s advancement has come precisely because of Washington’s reckless actions, our ruling class can only turn to the same option Germany’s bourgeoisie embraced after losing World War I. This option is to consolidate the capitalist state’s control, and ally with the most reactionary elements in order to create a force for counterrevolutionary terror.
The revitalization of industry so that the country can prepare for a great new war is also part of this fascist playbook, which is another reason why we must resist the war machine. The logical conclusion of the route the imperial powers have taken is a scenario where they morph into Nazi states, like Ukraine has. There’s no telling which part of the globe they’ll pick when they repeat Hitler’s invasions, though given how successful Operation Z is set to be at denazification, it’s possible this new military campaign will also be directed at eastern Europe. We must stop this decayed version of NATO from starting World War III, which it’s already come unprecedentedly close to simply through its liberal proxy war. Imagine how these countries will act if they’re in the equivalent state that Germany was a century ago, and their fascist movements lack sufficient internal opposition.
With the explosion in inflation, we’ve fulfilled yet another historical prerequisite for such a fascist takeover. This is how the colonial countries implode during capitalism’s imperialist stage: when they encounter the crises that imperialism creates for them, their ruling classes react by trying to maintain the system through tremendous violence. Once the U.S. is kicked out of Asia in a fuller sense, the situation in the core will grow even scarier than it’s already become. The terror campaign against transgender people is a manifestation of this 21st century fascism, and it’s set a precedent for what the forces of reaction will do to every other group they seek to subdue. We communists in the core can only win against this enemy by building a movement that’s global in its focus. By allying with the world’s anti-imperialist governments, both so we can combat liberalism and so we’ll have friends to turn to when the class conflict escalates.
We must understand that liberalism is only the initial layer of the resistance we’ll face, and that when we’ve become too powerful for the liberals to stop, they’ll send the fascists to try to physically exterminate us. The same applies to U.S. hegemony, because the more successful we get at aiding its decline, the more aggressive the counterinsurgency within the empire will get. Liberalism and unipolarity are losing, making way for the final confrontation between capital’s enemies and capital’s fighting wing. Every day, that decisive moment of conflict gets closer.
—————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
