Archive for category: #Imperialism #Multipolar
Even though the September 11 attacks transpired more than 20 years ago, their impact on the United States and its security practices endures. As a scholar who investigates both domestic and global surveillance, I have come across skeptics who think that the global “war on terror” may be waning. For example, some argue that the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan indicates that the global…

The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation.
The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion—more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.
This year’s spending just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
The list goes on—and on and on. President Eisenhower characterized such tradeoffs in a lesser known speech, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered in April 1953, early in his first term, this way: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…”
How sadly of this moment that is.
New Rationales, New Weaponry
Now, don’t be fooled. The current war machine isn’t your grandfather’s MIC, not by a country mile. It receives far more money and offers far different rationales. It has far more sophisticated tools of influence and significantly different technological aspirations.
Perhaps the first and foremost difference between Eisenhower’s era and ours is the sheer size of the major weapons firms. Before the post-Cold War merger boom of the 1990s, there were dozens of significant defense contractors. Now, there are just five big (no, enormous!) players—Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. With so few companies to produce aircraft, armored vehicles, missile systems, and nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has ever more limited leverage in keeping them from overcharging for products that don’t perform as advertised. The Big Five alone routinely split more than $150 billion in Pentagon contracts annually, or nearly 20% of the total Pentagon budget. Altogether, more than half of the department’s annual spending goes to contractors large and small.
In Eisenhower’s day, the Soviet Union, then this country’s major adversary, was used to justify an ever larger, ever more permanent arms establishment. Today’s “pacing threat,” as the Pentagon calls it, is China, a country with a far larger population, a far more robust economy, and a far more developed technical sector than the Soviet Union ever had. But unlike the USSR, China’s primary challenge to the United States is economic, not military.
For Pentagon contractors, Washington’s ever more intense focus on the prospect of war with China has one overriding benefit: It’s fabulous for business.
Yet, as Dan Grazier noted in a December 2022 report for the Project on Government Oversight, Washington’s ever more intense focus on China has been accompanied by significant military threat inflation. While China hawks in Washington wring their hands about that country having more naval vessels than America, Grazier points out that our Navy has far more firepower. Similarly, the active American nuclear weapons stockpile is roughly nine times as large as China’s and the Pentagon budget three times what Beijing spends on its military, according to the latest figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
But for Pentagon contractors, Washington’s ever more intense focus on the prospect of war with China has one overriding benefit: It’s fabulous for business. The threat of China’s military, real or imagined, continues to be used to justify significant increases in military spending, especially on the next generation of high-tech systems ranging from hypersonic missiles to robotic weapons and artificial intelligence. The history of such potentially dysfunctional high-tech systems, from President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system to the F-35, does not bode well, however, for the cost or performance of emerging military technologies.
No matter, count on one thing: Tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars will undoubtedly go into developing them anyway. And remember that they are dangerous and not just to any enemy. As Michael Klare pointed out in an Arms Control Association report: “AI-enabled systems may fail in unpredictable ways, causing unintended human slaughter or an uncontrolled escalation crisis.”
Arsenal of Influence
Despite a seemingly never-ending list of overpriced, underperforming weapons systems developed for a Pentagon that’s the only federal agency never to pass an audit, the MIC has an arsenal of influence propelling it ever closer to a trillion-dollar annual budget. In short, it’s bilking more money from taxpayers than ever before and just about everyone—from lobbyists galore to countless political campaigns, think tanks beyond number to Hollywood—is in on it.
And keep in mind that the dominance of a handful of mega-firms in weapons production means that each of the top players has more money to spread around in lobbying and campaign contributions. They also have more facilities and employees to point to, often in politically key states, when persuading members of Congress to vote for—Yes!–even more money for their weaponry of choice.
The arms industry as a whole has donated more than $83 million to political candidates in the past two election cycles, with Lockheed Martin leading the pack with $9.1 million in contributions, followed by Raytheon at $8 million, and Northrop Grumman at $7.7 million. Those funds, you won’t be surprised to learn, are heavily concentrated among members of the House and Senate armed services committees and defense appropriations subcommittees. For example, as Taylor Giorno of OpenSecrets, a group that tracks campaign and lobbying expenditures, has found, “The 58 members of the House Armed Services Committee reported receiving an average of $79,588 from the defense sector during the 2022 election cycle, three times the average $26,213 other representatives reported through the same period.”
Nearly 700 former high-ranking government officials, including former generals and admirals, now work for defense contractors.
Lobbying expenditures by all the denizens of the MIC are even higher—more than $247 million in the last two election cycles. Such funds are used to employ 820 lobbyists, or more than one for every member of Congress. And mind you, more than two-thirds of those lobbyists had swirled through Washington’s infamous revolving door from jobs at the Pentagon or in Congress to lobby for the arms industry. Their contacts in government and knowledge of arcane acquisition procedures help ensure that the money keeps flowing for more guns, tanks, ships, and missiles. Just last month, the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) reported that nearly 700 former high-ranking government officials, including former generals and admirals, now work for defense contractors. While a few of them are corporate board members or highly paid executives, 91% of them became Pentagon lobbyists, according to the report.
And that feverishly spinning revolving door provides current members of Congress, their staff, and Pentagon personnel with a powerful incentive to play nice with those giant contractors while still in their government roles. After all, a lucrative lobbying career awaits once they leave government service.
Nor is it just K Street lobbying jobs those weapons-making corporations are offering. They’re also spreading jobs to nearly every Main Street in America. The poster child for such jobs as a selling point for an otherwise questionable weapons system is Lockheed Martin’s F-35. It may never be fully ready for combat thanks to countless design flaws, including more than 800 unresolved defects detected by the Pentagon’s independent testing office. But the company insists that its program produces no less than 298,000 jobs in 48 states, even if the actual total is less than half of that.
In reality—though you’d never know this in today’s Washington—the weapons sector is a declining industry when it comes to job creation, even if it does absorb near-record levels of government funding. According to statistics gathered by the National Defense Industrial Association, there are currently one million direct jobs in arms manufacturing compared to 3.2 million in the 1980s.
Outsourcing, automation, and the production of fewer units of more complex systems have skewed the workforce toward better-paying engineering jobs and away from production work, a shift that has come at a high price. The vacuuming up of engineering and scientific talent by weapons makers means fewer skilled people are available to address urgent problems like public health and the climate crisis. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that spending on education, green energy, health care, or infrastructure could produce 40% to 100% more jobs than Pentagon spending does.
Shaping the Elite Narrative: The Military-Industrial Complex and Think Tanks
One of the MIC’s most powerful tools is its ability to shape elite discussions on national security issues by funding foreign policy think tanks, along with affiliated analysts who are all too often the experts of choice when it comes to media coverage on issues of war and peace. A forthcoming Quincy Institute brief reveals that more than 75% of the top foreign-policy think tanks in the United States are at least partially funded by defense contractors. Some, like the Center for a New American Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, receive millions of dollars every year from such contractors and then publish articles and reports that are largely supportive of defense-industry funding.
Some such think tanks even offer support for weapons made by their funders without disclosing those glaring conflicts of interest. For example, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar’s critique of this year’s near-historically high Pentagon budget request, which, she claimed, was “well below inflation,” also included support for increased funding for a number of weapons systems like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, the B-21 bomber, and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.
What’s not mentioned in the piece? The companies that build those weapons, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, have been AEI funders. Although that institute is a “dark money” think tank that doesn’t publicly disclose its funders, at an event last year, a staffer let slip that the organization receives money from both of those contractors.
Such think tanks have their own version of a feverishly spinning revolving door, earning them the moniker “holding tanks” for future government officials.
Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets disproportionately rely on commentary from experts at just such think tanks. That forthcoming Quincy Institute report, for example, found that they were more than four times as likely as those without MIC funding to be cited in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal articles about the Ukraine War. In short, when you see a think-tank expert quoted on questions of war and peace, odds are his or her employer receives money from the war machine.
What’s more, such think tanks have their own version of a feverishly spinning revolving door, earning them the moniker “holding tanks” for future government officials. The Center for a New American Security, for example, receives millions of dollars from defense contractors and the Pentagon every year and has boasted that a number of its experts and alumni joined the Biden administration, including high-ranking political appointees at the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Shaping the Public Narrative: The Military-Entertainment Complex
Top Gun: Maverick was a certified blockbuster, wowing audiences that ultimately gave that action film an astounding 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes—and such popular acclaim helped earn the movie a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It was also a resounding success for the Pentagon, which worked closely with the filmmakers and provided, “equipment—including jets and aircraft carriers—personnel and technical expertise,” and even had the opportunity to make script revisions, according to The Washington Post. Defense contractors were similarly a pivotal part of that movie’s success. In fact, the CEO of Lockheed Martin boasted that his firm “partnered with Top Gun’s producers to bring cutting-edge, future forward technology to the big screen.”
While Top Gun: Maverick might have been the most successful recent product of the military-entertainment complex, it’s just the latest installment in a long history of Hollywood spreading military propaganda. “The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows,” according to Professor Roger Stahl, who researches propaganda and state violence at the University of Georgia.
“The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows.”
“The result is an entertainment culture rigged to produce relatively few antiwar movies and dozens of blockbusters that glorify the military,” explained journalist David Sirota, who has repeatedly called attention to the perils of the military-entertainment complex. “And save for filmmakers’ obligatory thank you to the Pentagon in the credits,” argued Sirota, “audiences are rarely aware that they may be watching government-subsidized propaganda.”
What Next for the MIC?
More than 60 years after Eisenhower identified the problem and gave it a name, the military-industrial complex continues to use its unprecedented influence to corrupt budget and policy processes, starve funding for non-military solutions to security problems, and ensure that war is the ever more likely “solution” to this country’s problems. The question is: What can be done to reduce its power over our lives, our livelihoods, and ultimately, the future of the planet?
Countering the modern-day military-industrial complex would mean dislodging each of the major pillars undergirding its power and influence. That would involve campaign-finance reform; curbing the revolving door between the weapons industry and government; shedding more light on its funding of political campaigns, think tanks, and Hollywood; and prioritizing investments in the jobs of the future in green technology and public health instead of piling up ever more weapons systems. Most important of all, perhaps, a broad-based public education campaign is needed to promote more realistic views of the challenge posed by China and to counter the current climate of fear that serves the interests of the Pentagon and the giant weapons contractors at the expense of the safety and security of the rest of us.
That, of course, would be no small undertaking, but the alternative—an ever-spiraling arms race that could spark a world-ending conflict or prevent us from addressing existential threats like climate change and pandemics—is simply unacceptable.
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, and Native News Online.
Colonialism and market forces are destroying the planet and affecting Indigenous peoples’ health, a draft report from the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues declared last week. One of only three U.N. bodies that deal specifically with Indigenous issues, the Forum’s report was the culmination of two weeks of talks around the theme of Indigenous peoples, human health, planetary and territorial health, and climate change. “The destruction of the Earth is driving a global health and humanitarian crisis,” the Forum wrote.
“It is unacceptable that we continue to hear how Indigenous leaders and human rights defenders from among Indigenous peoples are threatened, harassed, and killed for defending their home,” Forum chair Darío José Mejía Montalvo, Indigenous Zenú from Colombia, said in a closing statement.
The near-final report described the eviction of Indigenous communities to create protected conservation areas, green energy projects that violated human rights, and the killings of land defenders—particularly women and children. It made a list of recommendations to U.N. agencies and member states, including calling on the United States to release Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier and decommission the Line 5 oil pipeline that passes through Canada, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The Forum also called on UNESCO to “step up” its protection of Indigenous lands and culture from mining activities like Rio Tinto’s projects in Oak Flat in Arizona and Juukan Gorge in Western Australia.
“I’m more engaged and excited about the language that we got put into this report than in years past,” Geoffrey Roth, a Standing Rock Sioux descendant and Forum member said. “I think that we made some really good progress.”
The challenge now is ensuring that the report’s recommendations are implemented by U.N. agencies and member states, over which the Forum has no enforcement power. Last year, for example, the Forum for the first time made the same recommendation about releasing Leonard Peltier, and a similar recommendation that member states, primarily Australia and New Zealand, reform their child protection policies to prevent the removal of children from Indigenous communities. In both instances, member states ignored the Forum’s recommendations.
Roth says that the Forum needs to do a better job of following up with its recommendations and working to hold agencies and countries accountable. That includes mobilizing allies in the U.N. system to follow the Forum’s recommendations, working with human rights bodies and experts to coordinate advocacy, and pressuring member states to take the Forum’s recommendations seriously.
“The Permanent Forum is not merely a single event,” Mejía Montalvo said. “Each and every one of us, stakeholders in our struggle, will return to our agencies, our region, our countries, our territories, and we will continue our work.”
But some Indigenous leaders say that for action to truly take place, the U.N. system itself needs to change – and provide Indigenous peoples access to international negotiations to influence policy, a fight Indigenous advocates have been advancing for a century, beginning in 1923 with the League of Nations. Currently, Indigenous leaders are excluded from high level U.N. bodies like the General Assembly, which decides the U.N. budget, elects member states to the Security Council, and sets other key international goals and policies.

“We have no voice at that level,” said Kenneth Deer, a member of the Mohawk Nation of the Haudenosaunee who has worked to increase Indigenous peoples’ participation at the U.N. since 1987. “We need a voice there to defend our interest.”
The ability to wield more influence in international negotiations may be getting closer though. During this year’s Permanent Forum, Csaba Kőrösi, President of the General Assembly, held a final hearing on enhanced participation of Indigenous peoples, which refers to a process that would put Indigenous leaders closer to the level of member states. “While member states are the decision makers, Indigenous Peoples have an opportunity to significantly shape those decisions. Indigenous Peoples must have those opportunities,” Kőrösi said.
Kőrösi will prepare a summary report on the hearing to circulate to all member states, observers of the General Assembly (GA), and Indigenous Peoples by September, his office confirmed. “The next steps in this process will be decided by intergovernmental negotiations in the framework of the GA,” said spokesperson for the President of the General Assembly, Paulina Kubiak.
“The future of the planet is at risk,” said Hannah McGlade, an Indigenous Noongar member of the Permanent Forum from Australia. “Indigenous people have to be at the forefront of responses to climate change. We can’t do that unless we are properly empowered here at the U.N., and I’m sad to say that we are not at this time.”
Attendees say that the Forum is far from perfect. Indigenous leaders who attend the Forum are given three minute windows to speak, and must share the event’s timetable with non-governmental organizations and member states–the process takes days with more than a thousand speakers hoping to get their message into the Forum’s final report. One attendee, Wilfredo Tsamash, who is Awajún and a representative for the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest, waited three days to deliver a statement at the Forum about the dangers of carbon markets and violence against land defenders in the Amazon, but was never called on to speak. “The Permanent Forum needs to change and they need to prioritize the messages coming from Indigenous organizations,” he said. The Forum’s report only includes one brief mention of the Amazon.
High costs also restrict Indigenous peoples from participating. Many Indigenous organizations can only afford to stay for a few days of the two-week gathering. “New York is a very expensive place to be for the ordinary person of the United States, let alone Indigenous peoples who come from remote and rural communities that are struggling just to be here to make a statement,” said Cristina Coc, spokesperson for the Maya Leaders Alliance of Southern Belize.
During the Forum, non-governmental organizations hold dozens of side events, and with strict, limited time during the Forum’s main sessions, the events provide space to discuss crucial topics. But they come at a cost: renting a United Nations conference room can run from $586 to nearly $2,000 for an event, making spaces available almost exclusively to advocacy organizations with deep pockets. Binota Moy Dhamai, a member of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples from Bangladesh, said that these costs are discriminatory against smaller organizations. “If they want to organize this kind of event, they simply can’t do it, because they don’t have money,” he said.
In his closing statement, Mejía Montalvo said that he personally heard one member state say that speaking out on certain issues would cause suffering. “That is in no way, now or at any point, acceptable, and such statements cannot be made,” Mejía Montalvo said. “They cannot, and must not, face reprisal when returning.” One attendee told Grist they delayed returning home due to safety concerns after accusing their country of human rights violations. A source familiar with the matter added that an additional two attendees have been unable to return home for fear of government retaliation. Their identities have not been revealed for their protection.
“This is our life we’re talking about,” said Cristina Coc. “That three minutes of taking the floor could result in our death.”
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights declined to comment on threats made to Forum participants. Mejía Montalvo urged member states to guarantee the safe return of all Forum participants.
Next year, the Forum will focus on a theme of self-determination and Indigenous youth. Meanwhile, the report will wind its way through the U.N. system to the General Assembly for a vote this fall to reaffirm non-binding human rights standards for Indigenous Peoples.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How changing the United Nations will help Indigenous peoples and the world on May 3, 2023.

America is a stratocracy, a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licenses the war machine to economically disembowel the country and drive the Empire into one self-defeating conflict after another. The militarists win every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”
This article originally appeared on ScheerPost.
Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered. Foreign aid is contingent on buying U.S. weapons. Egypt, which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems. Israel has received $158 billion in bilateral assistance from the U.S. since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from U.S. weapons manufacturers. The American public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.
Between October 2021 and September 2022, the U.S. spent $877 billion on the military, that’s more than the next 10 countries, including China, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the U.S. spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.
The public, bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation. It revels in the despicable beauty of our military prowess. It speaks in the thought-terminating clichés spewed out by mass culture and mass media. It imbibes the illusion of omnipotence and wallows in self-adulation.
The intoxication of war is a plague. It imparts an emotional high that is impervious to logic, reason or fact. No nation is immune. The gravest mistake made by European socialists on the eve of the First World War was the belief that the working classes of France, Germany, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and Great Britain would not be divided into antagonistic tribes because of disputes between imperialist governments. They would not, the socialists assured themselves, sign on for the suicidal slaughter of millions of working men in the trenches. Instead, nearly every socialist leader walked away from their anti-war platform to back their nation’s entry into the war. The handful who did not, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were sent to prison.
A society dominated by militarists distorts its social, cultural, economic and political institutions to serve the interests of the war industry. The essence of the military is masked with subterfuges — using the military to carry out humanitarian relief missions, evacuating civilians in danger, as we see in the Sudan, defining military aggression as “humanitarian intervention” or a way to protect democracy and liberty, or lauding the military as carrying out a vital civic function by teaching leadership, responsibility, ethics and skills to young recruits. The true face of the military — industrial slaughter — is hidden.
The mantra of the militarized state is national security. If every discussion begins with a question of national security, every answer includes force or the threat of force. The preoccupation with internal and external threats divides the world into friend and foe, good and evil. Militarized societies are fertile ground for demagogues. Militarists, like demagogues, see other nations and cultures in their own image – threatening and aggressive. They seek only domination.
It was not in our national interest to wage war for two decades across the Middle East. It is not in our national interest to go to war with Russia or China. But militarists need war the way a vampire needs blood.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev and later Vladimir Putin lobbied to be integrated into western economic and military alliances. An alliance that included Russia would have nullified the calls to expand NATO — which the U.S. had promised it would not do beyond the borders of a unified Germany — and have made it impossible to convince countries in eastern and central Europe to spend billions on U.S. military hardware. Moscow’s requests were rebuffed. Russia was made the enemy, whether it wanted to be or not. None of this made us more secure. Washington’s decision to interfere in Ukraine’s domestic affairs by backing a coup in 2014 triggered a civil war and Russia’s subsequent invasion.
But for those who profit from war, antagonizing Russia, like antagonizing China, is a good business model. Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin saw their stock prices increase by 40 percent and 37 percent respectively as a result of the Ukraine conflict.
A war with China, now an industrial giant, would disrupt the global supply chain with devastating effects on the U.S. and global economy. Apple produces 90 percent of its products in China. U.S. trade with China was $690.6 billion last year. In 2004, U.S. manufacturing output was more than twice China’s. China’s output is now nearly double that of the United States. China produces the largest number of ships, steel and smartphones in the world. It dominates the global production of chemicals, metals, heavy industrial equipment and electronics. It is the world’s largest rare earth mineral exporter, its greatest reserve holder and is responsible for 80 percent of its refining worldwide. Rare earth minerals are essential to the manufacture of computer chips, smartphones, television screens, medical equipment, fluorescent light bulbs, cars, wind turbines, smart bombs, fighter jets and satellite communications.
War with China would result in massive shortages of a variety of goods and resources, some vital to the war industry, paralyzing U.S. businesses. Inflation and unemployment would rocket upwards. Rationing would be implemented. The global stock exchanges, at least in the short term, would be shut down. It would trigger a global depression. If the U.S. Navy was able to block oil shipments to China and disrupt its sea lanes, the conflict could potentially become nuclear.
In “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” the military alliance sees the future as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China. It calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict. In October 2022, Air Force General Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, presented his “Mobility Manifesto” to a packed military conference. During this unhinged fearmongering diatribe, Minihan argued that if the U.S. does not dramatically escalate its preparations for a war with China, America’s children will find themselves “subservient to a rules based order that benefits only one country [China].”
According to the New York Times, the Marine Corps is training units for beach assaults, where the Pentagon believes the first battles with China may occur, across “the first island chain” that includes, “Okinawa and Taiwan down to Malaysia as well as the South China Sea and disputed islands in the Spratlys and the Paracels.”.
Militarists drain funds from social and infrastructure programs. They pour money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. The public is impoverished. The harsh forms of control the militarists test and perfect abroad migrate back to the homeland. Militarized Police. Militarized drones. Surveillance. Vast prison complexes. Suspension of basic civil liberties. Censorship.
Those such as Julian Assange, who challenge the stratocracy, who expose its crimes and suicidal folly, are ruthlessly persecuted. But the war state harbors within it the seeds of its own destruction. It will cannibalize the nation until it collapses. Before then, it will lash out, like a blinded cyclops, seeking to restore its diminishing power through indiscriminate violence. The tragedy is not that the U.S. war state will self-destruct. The tragedy is that we will take down so many innocents with us.
By Francisco Dominguez – April 19, 2023
In December 2023, the infamous Monroe Doctrine will be 200 years old. For some people, the name refers simply to a long and complex foreign policy document with constitutional status, but it is far more than that.
In his seventh annual message to Congress, US President James Monroe used six minutes of his hour-long speech to espouse his future plan for the continent, then in the midst of a war of liberation from Spanish colonial domination. This six-minute vision became known as the Monroe Doctrine.
By 1823 most of Latin America had successfully declared independence, and liberation armies, commanded by Simon Bolívar and other freedom fighters, were in the final stages of defeating a Spanish military counteroffensive. With Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the sale of Louisiana to the US in 1803 and the loss of Haiti following a slave rebellion in 1804, France’s American empire had already collapsed. These momentous developments offered rich pickings in the New World to “Perfidious Albion” (a term that referred to Britain’s bad faith and duplicity in international relations).
Monroe Doctrine promoters believed that only by controlling the whole of the Western Hemisphere and the new republics would the US consolidate, expand and remove the threat from the European empires. The main threat to the US came from a substantially strengthened British empire that had Canada to its north, the strategic islands of the British West Indies to its south, and strong relations with Native American tribes. Furthermore, Cuban and Puerto Rican Creole oligarchies remained loyal Spanish colonies, allowing Spain to maintain a strong military presence in the Caribbean.
In Europe, the Holy Alliance, a coalition of European monarchies whose reactionary objective was to eradicate all traces of republicanism and liberalism in the Old World and Latin America, had plans to restore the American colonies to Spain. Consequently, to survive and develop the US needed to exert its rising influence over the Caribbean, Central America and the whole hemisphere, simultaneously helping to consolidate the new republics and keep the Europeans out.
Global South Solidarity Is the Key To Lifting up Central America – Not Washington’s Monroe Doctrine
In Britain, Foreign Secretary George Canning thought that British interests would be best served if not only were there no Spanish colonial restoration and other European powers were prevented from predatory incursions into former colonies, but also if the US did not gain hemispheric influence at the expense of Britain’s commercial relations with the new republics. He suggested to President Monroe that Britain and the US work together to keep the rest of Europe out of Latin America. Canning’s proposal would also have given Britain veto power over other hemispheric developments, including any US expansion southwards.
Unsurprisingly, Monroe ignored Britain’s request, and his “doctrine” sent a stern warning to the foreign ministers of Europe that no part of Latin America could be considered for future colonisation by any European power, and any attempt at colonisation would be regarded as a hostile act against the US.
For Monroe, Jefferson, Adams and other presidents, the United States was an example for the world, and the Monroe Doctrine was a vehicle to promote US principles. As such it became the precursor of the “Manifest Destiny,” a term coined by journalist John O’Sullivan in his 1845 essay in support of annexing Texas. He argued: it is “the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” US leaders believed that given the virtuosity of its people and institutions, God had assigned the US with the duty to shape the rest of the continent and the world by expanding its dominion and spreading democracy and capitalism. Deeply racist, it posited the “civilising” of indigenous peoples of all North and South America, including dispossessing the former from their lands—all predicated on Anglo-American racial superiority.
US territorial expansion, at the expense of indigenous lands and Mexico, was staggering. From the 13 original colonies in 1783 (1,100,00 sq km), after adding the Louisiana Purchase (2,140,000 sq km, 1803), Florida (170,310 sq km, 1819), Texas (695,596 sq km, 1838) and 55% of Mexico’s territory (California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming, 1,370,000 sq km, 1848), the US’s geographical size increased fourfold to 5,475,906 sq km. Ominously for Latin America’s future, the US used military means to annex Texas (Mexican-Texan War, 1834-36) and half of Mexico (Mexican-American War, 1845-48).
1823 also marked the year when annexationist and future president John Quincy Adams drew his famous ripe fruit analogy: “if an apple severed by its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union.”
The US threatened war to prevent the transfer of Cuban sovereignty, and in 1823 former president Thomas Jefferson advised President Monroe to oppose, with all US means, most especially Cuba’s transfer “to any power by conquest, cession or in any other way.” The US strongly coveted the island, which was key to its commercial and military hegemony over the Caribbean.
Cuba was an exception to independence. Haiti’s revolution (1791-1804) had led Cuba to become the substitute world sugar supplier; therefore, it had imported large numbers of enslaved people to work in its expanding sugar economy. The numbers of enslaved people in Cuba rose from 44,000 in 1774 to nearly 370,000 by 1861; in 1841 the black population was greater than the white.
Monument to Carlota Lucumí, leader of the 1843 slave rebellion at the Triumvirato Sugar Mill in Matanzas.
Following the example in Haiti, enslaved people mounted rebellions in Cuba in 1812, 1826, 1830, 1837, 1840, 1841 and 1843. Cuban elites concluded that independence might lead to not only the end of Spanish colonial domination, but also an end to the enslaved labour they relied on. The social forces required to dislodge peninsular elites could, as they had in Haiti, extend to displace the criollo oligarchy. In the circumstances, they preferred to remain a Spanish colony.
The expansion of the sugar economy drew Cuba closer to the United States rather than Spain. “By the 1840s, almost half of Cuban trade depended directly on North American markets and manufacturers,” says historian Louis A Pérez in his book Cuba, Between Reform and Revolution. “Sugar, molasses, and hides went out, vital foodstuffs, sugar machinery, and, increasingly, [US] capital came in.” In 1848 president James K Polk offered US$100 million to purchase the island. In 1854 President Franklin Pierce raised the offer to US$130 million.
Degrowth, Drug Fetishism, & ‘Anti-Colonialism’ Are Used as Weapons Against the Revolutionary Cause
Although many in the Cuban elite were not seeking independence, Spain was increasingly unable to protect its colony from rebellions, and the US was incapable of taking the island due to the domestic polarisation between slave and free states. Sections of the Cuban oligarchy thought annexation to the US would both make slavery survive and be the salvation of the sugar economy. However, following Spain’s abolition of slavery, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a Cuban landowner, freed the enslaved people on his land and sparked the first Cuban War of Independence (1868-78).
Despite intense pressure, US President Ulysses Grant, who was strongly anti-slavery, accepted Cuban revolutionaries’ belligerent status but remained neutral. It would be entirely different in Cuba’s second War of Independence (1895-98). In 1898, President William McKinley declared war against Spain, ostensibly for having blown up the warship USS Maine and to help “liberate Cuba,” but in reality to prevent its independence.
Cuba’s revolutionary leader, José Martí, painfully aware of the US’s hegemonic intentions, believed Cuba’s timely independence would prevent the US “from extending itself across the Antilles and falling with greater weight upon the lands of our America.” Just when the Cuban rebels were about to succeed in 1898, with an army of 17,000 the US took military control of the island, defeated Spain, and, confirming Martí’s apprehension, went on to occupy Puerto Rico, extend the war against Spain to the Philippines (which it also occupied militarily), annexed Hawaii, and took the island of Guam.
The US military occupied Cuba until 1902 and let it have an independent government by imposing two hefty constraints before lifting the occupation: the Platt Amendment and two military bases (Guantánamo and the Isle of Pines). The Amendment–which was added to the new Cuban constitution–gave the US authority to intervene militarily in Cuba, as it did in 1906-09, 1912, and 1917-22; furthermore, it prohibited Cuba from signing any treaty with another foreign power.
President Theodore Roosevelt developed the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny into his infamous Corollary: “in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
Roosevelt’s foreign policy method was “speak softly, but carry a big stick.” His Corollary would lead the US to break Panama from Colombia (1903), to the military occupations of Nicaragua (1912-1933), Haiti (1915-34), Dominican Republic (1916-1924), and to several more in Central America and the Caribbean. With the Cold War, the US’s most important interventions were Guatemala (1954), Dominican Republic (1961), Cuba (Bay of Pigs 1961), Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976), Nicaragua (1979-1990), Grenada (1983), El Salvador and Guatemala (1980s) and Panama (1989). Literally hundreds of thousands of people were butchered by these US Monroist incursions.
Until the Cuban Revolution, Cuba was a de facto US colony. Speaking to a US Senate Committee in 1960, former US ambassador to Cuba Earl E T Smith said: “Until Castro, the US was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that the American ambassador was the second most important man, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president.”
By 1959, US direct investment in electric power and the telephone service was 90%; raw sugar production, 37%; commercial banking, 30%; public service railways, 50%; petroleum refining, 66%; insurance, 20%; and nickel mining, 100%. Furthermore, the island had become a paradise for gambling, the Mafia, and prostitution, and, being a single-crop economy, large sections of its population endured poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy and chronic unemployment.
The Monroe Doctrine with its enhancements, the Manifest Destiny and the Roosevelt Corollary, is a US template for hegemony. The Cuban Revolution broke the vicious cycle of US domination in the island, but US Monroist aggression continues as proved by 61 years of blockade and ruthless US attacks on progressive governments in the 21st century.
In 2019, the fanatical cold warrior John Bolton claimed that the “Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.” He is right. US racism, exploitation and military interventions–with their horrible trails of violence, exploitation, poverty, destruction and death all across Latin America and the world–are, appallingly, very much alive. Humanity has endured 200 years too many of this damn “doctrine.”
The rights group commissioned an independent review of its August accusation that Ukrainian forces illegally put civilians in harm’s way.
The 50th anniversary of Vietnam War’s end and the return of American prisoners of war (POWs) from Hanoi has passed with little notice. While independent media outlets like Truthout reported on the war’s ongoing legacies of trauma, with the exception of a USA Today series in late March that included Vietnam veteran portraits, nearly all major news organizations opted not to cover the anniversary.
The consensus from the authors reviewed here is that the anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian causes requires profound socio-economic and political changes at all levels of global society.
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