The Biden administration just released their new National Security Strategy. It is designed to restore and enforce Washington’s domination over global capitalism and the international state system against pretenders to its throne as the imperial hegemon.
As the document puts it, the world order is at an “inflection point;” “the post-Cold War era is definitely over, and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” This is a new predicament for the U.S. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington resembled a modern-day Rome with unrivaled geopolitical, economic, and military power to enforce free trade globalization and its attendant inequalities within and between nation states.
However, the U.S. has been in relative decline over the last 20 years and now faces both imperial rivals China and Russia, as well regional rivals like Iran, among others. Beijing Moscow are developing their own strategies to pursue their respective imperialist and local assertions of power, most dramatically demonstrated by Beijing’s threat to annex Taiwan and Russia’s horrific colonial war on Ukraine.
Faced by inter-imperial rivalry the left must not support the U.S. and should not foolishly align with its predatory international and regional opponents. Instead, we must create solidarity from below between the struggles of class, nationality, and national in an international struggle to liberate, equality, democracy, and build solidarity.
Modern Imperialism and its Capitalist Roots
The rivalries Biden’s National Security Strategy identifies are not an accident — nor the product of bad, autocratic governments — but the result of capitalism’s logic of competition for profit. This imperative forces corporations to look beyond their borders for resources, markets, labor, and other resources around the globe.
Each capitalist state builds military arsenals to enforce their corporations’ claims around the globe. Economic competition between corporations results in imperial competition, and sometimes even wars for dominance over global economies.
These conflicts result in a new hierarchy within capitalist states. Some sit at the top, others are below, and those at bottom suffer national oppression through colonial rule, or indirectly through political, economic, and financial subjection to the dictates the most powerful countries.
These hierarchies are not always permanent. Old powers fall, new powers rise, and they become conflict when each attempt to order the system in the favor of its capitalist class. As such, we have seen inter-imperial conflict in many phases, starting with the colonial division that ended in World War II and ending with the superpower standoff between America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The fall of the Soviet Empire did not bring an end to imperialism. Washington was able to oversee a time of unrivalled dominance that was unipolar. It implemented a grand strategy of incorporating all states into a neoliberal order and preventing the emergence of new peer competitors — that is, imperial rivals.
During this period the U.S. used international financial institutions to pry open and prey on the Global South, enforced neoliberal policies at gunpoint through feigned “humanitarian intervention” in countries like Haiti, overthrew regimes in so-called “rogue states” that bucked U.S. dictates like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and plotted to make sure that no rival or network of rivals came together to challenge it. These were the golden age of the rules-based international order.
The New Asymmetric Multipolar World Order
Over the past two decades several developments have cracked this unipolar moment, led to the relative decline of the U.S., and ushered in today’s new asymmetric multipolar world order. The long neoliberal boom of the 1980s through 2008 led to new capital accumulation centers such as China, Brazil and South Africa.
Washington’s attempt to lock in its dominance through wars to control the Middle East and its strategic energy reserves blew up in its face. Its defeat in Iraq led retired General William Odom to call the war “the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.”
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis pushed capitalism into a new era. global slumpThe U.S. and its European allies were particularly hard hit. For a time, China sustained its massive expansion and propped up the economies of numerous countries — from Australia to Brazil — that export raw materials to meet the demand of China’s manufacturing industries.
The pandemic and another global recession further intensified geopolitical tensions. Particularly, the U.S. and Russia didn’t coordinate their responses to COVID and the economic crisis. Each has been adopting increasingly nationalist strategies.
All of these developments created today’s asymmetric multipolar world order. While the U.S. is still the dominant state force with the largest economy, military, and geopolitical influence in the world, it now faces imperial rivals from China and Russia and emboldened regional power that are jockeying to be first in their respective regions. global capitalism’s crisis-torna conflict-ridden state system.
Biden’s New Imperial Strategy
Recognizing the new order, the Biden administration abandoned its post-Cold War strategy to integrate all states under its umbrella and instead opted for great power rivalry against Russia, China, and other regional enemies. The president wants to rebuild the U.S. empire in order to outcompete, contain and confront these rivals.
Biden’s National Security Strategy disguises a nationalist strategy as a U.S.-led global contest of democracies against autocracies. It includes a new policy on industrial security that aims to increase the competitiveness, security, and security of U.S. companies. The Biden administration has issued a “Buy American” executive order, pushed to secure supply chains by onshoring manufacturing or “friend shoring” it to strategic allies, and poured money into the high tech industry through the $280 billion CHIPS Act.
Biden wants to force both the Global North as well as the Global South to join proposed trade pacts. His administration is currently pushing for a new trade agreement in Asia, as well as a “Build Back Better World” plan for development in the Global South — an explicit attempt to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Washington is also encouraging its allies to follow suit. banning sales of high end microchipsTo China and Russia barring Chinese companies from supplying hardware for their 5G systems, and restricting Chinese entry to strategic research-development.
Biden’s new National Security Strategy also includes an ambitious plan for adapting the U.S. military in order to confront China in Asia Pacific and Russia within Eastern Europe. These include massive new investments in both conventional as nuclear weapons. The president’s military budget for 2022 is already about $750 billion, with further increases expected in coming years.
Biden intends to maintain and expand the U.S.’s imperial reach through existing and new military alliances. Thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has been able revitalize NATO and add both Sweden and Finland to its membership, consolidating Washington’s dominion over Europe.
The U.S. has established a new pact with the Asia Pacific. AUKUSAustralia and the U.K. will facilitate the sale of nuclear submarines from Canberra to Australia. Biden has doubled the amount of pre-existing formations such as the QUAD. This, in addition to the U.S., includes Australia and India, Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The so-called Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council is comprised of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. He even convinced The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)China must be confronted in Asia
The U.S. against China and Russia
Evidently, Biden’s foreign policy strategy is focused on great power competition with Russia and, most importantly, China. He denounces both as “revisionist powers” that threaten Washington’s hegemony over the international state system and global capitalism. Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine enabled Washington — the butcher of Iraq and Afghanistan — to get up on its moral high horse, condemn Moscow, and rallie states around the globe to its side.
Biden’s strategy document denounces Russia for carrying out an “imperialist foreign policy” in Ukraine that is “an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and stability.” Against this threat, Biden promises to stand up for the UN Charter, support Ukraine, defend NATO members, and agitate for European energy independence from Russia. Of course, even as we recognize Washington’s imperial project in Eastern Europe, Ukraine’s fight for self-determination must be supported — including Ukrainians’ right to secure arms from anywhere (including NATO) to free themselves from Russian occupation.
Biden’s main preoccupation, however, is not Russia, but China. The National Security Strategy declares that China is “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.” Biden cynically exploits China’s imperial and repressive record in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan to rally the world behind Washington’s trade pacts, development plans and military alliances.
Taiwan is the key flashpoint of the U.S.-China conflict. Beijing threatens the capture of the country. Washington promises to arm it and defend it against any invasion. In this imperial war, the enemy is the Taiwanese people and their struggle for self-determinationYou are free from both.
Biden says that despite their truculent rhetoric and project they still believe that the U.S.-China can cooperate to address areas mutual concern. This is despite the fact that their conflict disrupts joint efforts to mitigate climate change and manage pandemics. In reality, this imperial rivalry will continue to metastasize not only in Asia but throughout the globe as the world’s two biggest economies duke it out for supremacy.
Biden’s “Democratic Despotism”
Biden’s new imperial plan is riddled with lies, hypocrisy and contradictions, all characteristics of what W. E. B. Du Bois long ago denounced as the “democratic despotism” of U.S. imperialism. These falsehoods undermine Biden’s claim that his plan is in the interests of the world’s people.
Biden has prioritised corporate profit and the military over social programs that benefit the working class and oppressed on the domestic front. While he boasts of investing in social reforms, the truth is that aside from stimulus checks most of those promised in the original version of “Build Back Better” fell by the wayside as his administration poured money into the Infrastructure Act and Inflation Reduction Act, both of which will benefit big business and do little to mitigate let alone reverse climate change.
Even Biden’s much lauded cancellation of student debt is unnecessarily limited and keeps in place the predatory loan system that bankrolls higher education and traps graduates in debt peonage. Compare that to the hundreds of billions he gave out to the military in 2022. Any benefit from the small reforms Biden has enacted to improve working people’s lives has now been decimated by rampant inflation and will be wiped out by the looming recession and consequent austerity measures and layoffs.
Globally, Biden’s pretension to building a capitalist international of democracies against autocracies is even less convincing. The U.S. itself has a system of elections in which corporate money largely dictates the results, a government that nakedly serves big business, an unelected Supreme Court controlled by far-right appointees that overrides public opinion on abortion and other issues, a criminal legal system that oversees the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration and police brutality, and a border regime that deports millions — mainly people of color — for the “crime” of migration.
Abroad, Washington’s “democratic” track record includes everything from toppling elected governments in countries like Iran and Guatemala to brutal imperialist wars in violation of the spirit — if not the letter — of the UN Charter from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. Its core allies are the former rulers of colonial imperial empires who have partnered with U.S. Imperialist efforts. orchestrating the 2004 coup against Jean Bertrand Aristide’s democratically elected government in Haiti.
Washington’s allies outside its North Atlantic core are little better. Examples of this are Israel and Saudi Arabia, both apartheid states. This reality was exposed in Biden’s so-called Summit for Democracy, which included many states that Freedom House categorized as “partly free,” “not free at all,” and “electoral autocracies.”
Hypocrisy aside, Biden’s plan for great power competition faces several problems and contradictions. The U.S. and most of the world’s economies are deeply integrated with China. Europe is dependent on Russian energy. A large part of the Global South is dependent on food exports from Russia or Ukraine. These facts make it difficult, if not impossible, for the U.S. of A. to side with Russia and China.
Washington’s nationalist economic policies also cut against collaboration with its own allies. Some already complain about this. Biden’s “Buy American” provisionsTheir businesses will be affected. France even denounced the AUKUS pact because it denied it lucrative contracts for submarines that it intended to sell to Australia.
International Solidarity Against Imperialism
However, we are headed towards a period of intense great-power conflict between imperial rivals with oppressed states caught between them. However, this is not the only axis that will cause conflict. We have also seen since the Great Recession a significant increase in the number of people who are unable to work together. global wave of protest, uprisings or strikes and attempted revolutions against oppressive governments and the great powers.
Two pitfalls must be avoided by the left in this situation. First and foremost, we must not align ourselves with the U.S. state, which is the biggest imperialist power in the world and therefore remains, as Martin Luther King Jr. argued and Iraq proves, “the great purveyor of violence in the world today.” That would only make us complicit in its project of global domination.
At the same time, we must not fall for the foolish politics of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” and align ourselves with Washington’s imperial and regional opponents, whose various track records of repression, imperialism, and counter-revolution are horrific in their own right. They offer no alternatives to workers or oppressed people, except for a new group of exploiters to replace them.
This is not the right time to indulge in imperial lesser evilism. Instead, we must strengthen solidarity across borders with all genuine efforts for freedom, democracy, equality in all parts of the world. We must not practice selective solidarity and extend our support only to struggles in states in this or that camp of today’s imperial blocs.
Our solidarity must be universal with all progressive struggles from below — from within the U.S. to China, Russia, and regional powers like Iran and to those they oppress from Palestine to Puerto Rico, Syria, Hong Kong, Ukraine, and many more. Only such international solidarity can connect popular struggles in a worldwide fight for a new world order that puts people, the planet, and profit before power and profit.
