A new form of imperialism
Rashed Rahman
Most commentators have puzzled over what is the end objective of the US-Israel war on Iran. That war has thrown the global order, such as it is, and the world economy into a tailspin from which it may not soon recover. If the aim was decapitation and regime change in Iran, that has clearly not worked. If Israel sought expansion into Palestinian territory and neighbouring Arab countries, e.g. Lebanon, that too seems a goal too far. In both these and any other territories the Zionist entity may target, resistance will be fierce and perhaps insurmountable. So what is this war really about?
The US desires full spectrum global dominance, both economic and military. This is not a new objective. Clearly and unequivocally stated or not, this has been the overriding aim of successive US administrations since the end of WWII. The urge for economic dominance formally began with the Bretton Woods system whereby without colonial physical conquest of territories the US was able, through the mechanisms of the World Bank and IMF, to subject the Third World to economic extraction in a manner that makes it difficult to trace and identify. The military hegemony drive, on the other hand, began with the atomic bombs unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Successive US Presidents since have pursued this goal. The Trump administration is more unilateralist (note the treatment of long standing western allies) and certainly more open about its intention to maintain ‘full spectrum dominance’ with massive military superiority that no one, enemy or friend, would even think of challenging. However, the difference between the historically defunct colonial empires and the current US pursuit of hegemony needs explication.
The US is the first, and so far only, purely capitalist empire. This by no means implies that capitalist powers have not been empires in the past. However, the US seeks to dominate the world largely through manipulating the economic mechanisms of capitalism. The British Empire, to take a more familiar example, hoped to exploit the commercial wealth of the Subcontinent without incurring the inevitable costs of colonial rule. Instead, it found itself creating a tribute-extracting military despotism resembling more traditional imperialisms than a new mode of capitalist hegemony. Perhaps learning from that experience, the US’s preference has been to avoid direct colonial rule wherever possible and rely on economic hegemony, which is less costly, less risky, and more profitable. But this enterprise is stricken with a fundamental contradiction.
While the objective of US imperialism is economic hegemony without colonial rule, global capital still, in fact more than ever, needs a closely regulated and predictable social, political and legal order. Imperial hegemony relies now more than ever on an ‘orderly’ system of many states, and global economic hegemony depends on keeping control of the many states that maintain the global economy. This capitalist mode of economic imperialism is the first in history that does not depend simply on capturing territory, or dominating subject peoples. It needs to oversee the whole global states system and ensure that imperial capital can safely and profitably navigate throughout the global system (a more complex task than the current concerns about navigating, physically, the Straits of Hormuz). It has to deal not only with ‘rogue’ and ‘failed’ states. It also has to keep subordinate states open and vulnerable to exploitation. To be really effective, it has to establish its military and political supremacy over all others to avoid a system in which military power is more or less evenly distributed among various states. Hence the build-up of military power and bases all over the world by the US, to pre-empt any rivalry.
Once this kind of military preponderance is established, it takes on a dynamic of its own. This is because it has no specific and self-limiting constraints. With the kind of huge unchallenged military preponderance it enjoys, the US will use it to pursue what any administration takes to be in its interests, and particularly when its economic supremacy is no longer without challenge (e.g. China). It only takes a Donald Trump to use this power beyond any reasonable limits. But this tendency to military excess is not just the aberration of a Trump. It is in fact inscribed in the mission of global capitalism itself. That implies a continuation and repetition of Trump-like military excesses in the future.
The world has been warned. The ‘demonstration effect’, by now a major pillar of US military policy, makes it hard to predict where the next adventure might play out. But play out it will, so long as US dominance (challenged but still supreme) persists. We have yet to see any signs of an alternative to the imperial policy of endless wars, not continuous perhaps but without end, in purpose or time.
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