Empire at Ground Zero in Ukraine

by Justin Akers Chacón · Published March 15, 2022 · Updated March 22, 2022

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the quickening of a regionwide war assemblage presents itself in classical Euro-Atlantic formation as the dress rehearsal for the next world war. The incessant building up of the stage and setting that counters the rival imperial houses, the alignment or realignments of supporting actors and bit players, and the clichéd tonalities of righteousness and evil; all giving way to the thunderous violence of death and destruction in an enlarging war theater.

The indiscriminate and systematic slaughter of the Ukrainian people is currently streaming in real time. This has been met with the quick distribution and just-in-time deployment of vast cargo loads of deadly weapon stocks to conduct resistance vis-à-vis Ukraine’s NATO backers. This has occurred in conjunction with, and alongside a fusillade of financial torpedoes designed to debilitate the Russian economy and the population as a whole. The lockstep march towards war is also unpacking and showcasing the full spectrum of 21^st century warfare—but fired through the cannons of 20^th century ideology and industrial-scale brutality; including scorched earth strategy and tactics, the targeting of civilians, technologies of mass incineration, cyber-onslaughts, capital flight, and life-wracking sanctions. Calamity is being orchestrated onto the heads of the invaded for the sole intention of inflicting as much human suffering as possible; while belligerents rush in to punish the civilian populations behind opposing lines to make them pay for the crimes of their autocratic ruler.

The outset of the next “great war” was both wholly preventable while simultaneously unstoppable. This irreconcilable contradiction beats within the capillaries of the conflictual and crisis-prone features of the capitalist imperialist world-system. The accumulation of tensions has arced in zig-zag trajectory in fits and bursts towards the inevitability of inter-imperialist rivalry, force buildup, positioning, and now—explosive outbreak. These events are unfolding alongside and in conjunction with the unraveling of the existing power arrangements of the international capitalist system, which have been jolted and fragmented by underlying and intensifying contradictions. Invasion and the subsequent drive towards total war is the ultimate reset for a brittle imperial configuration reaching its shelf-life; as rival capitalist powers use their military power more actively and aggressively to manipulate and force outcomes that may not occur on their own; to re-divide and recombine the pieces into a new order more closely assembled in their own interest and image.

The race towards the abyss of great war, with many capitalist nations lining up an taking active sides in the matter of days—if not hours; and the snarling for blood-letting now echoing within the ruling corridors of the armed nuclear states on all sides—should signal an alarm for all of the peoples of the world. The intractable crisis created by this war will only intensify and multiply in cascading forms and phases, and tear and separate along the seams of a global order in crisis.

The intractable crisis created by this war will only intensify and multiply in cascading forms and phases, and tear and separate along the seams of a global order in crisis.

There is the urgent necessity for oppositional forces to take the field in all of the belligerent nations whose ruling classes have kindled or fueled this drive towards invasion and war—whether directly or indirectly; and to be unequivocal and universal in the demand that the Russian death machine be withdrawn and that the Ukrainian people be completely liberated from any form of occupation; and that displaced peoples pouring out of the region be given sanctuary through the opening of all borders.

To prevent further escalation, and the continuation of a generational war pushing us to the brink of extinction, the resistance movements that emerge in the interstices of this war trajectory must learn to build and eventually redirect opposition towards class struggle against the ruling classes and the abolition of their systems that produce the wreckages of empire; to build antiimperialist and anticapitalist orientation into the grooves of struggle that can create an alternative pathway out of the inevitable crises and continued qualitative descent into barbarism that is already well underway.

Storming into the 'New American Century'

The dust had not yet settled from the collapse of the Soviet Union before the next aggressive phase in the reordering of the world-imperialist system began. The redivision and restructuring of the bipolar Cold War landscape began with a series of campaigns by the unipartisan imperial US state and its European and Asian counterparts to widen their respective spheres of capitalist control and influence. This had been achieved through opening previously closed borders to capital export and trade, expanding an offense-oriented military complex and building capacity into Eurasia, the legitimization of “preemptive war”, and by bombing into existence new political maps across the Middle East, Africa, and beyond through the declaration of an interminable “War on Terror.”[i] These components of global offensive forged the politico-military architecture and economic refoundation of the 21st century capitalist imperialism.

The capitalist classes of the US, Western Europe, and Japan, especially, worked more actively through their respective states to create new a redivision of control over international markets through the systematic elimination of capital controls and mobility restrictions. The elaboration of so-called ‘free trade agreements’ became the vehicle for removing tariffs, eliminating restrictions to foreign investment and ownership, and for the articulation of new exchange regimes to facilitate seamless wealth transfer and profit repatriation in neocolonial form. Through instruments of capitalist financialization such the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and hundreds of mediating bodies. The FTA crowbar began opening former Soviet economies, formerly colonized and systematically under-developed nations across Africa, Latin America, and Asia that have again been rendered economically vulnerable through recent episodes of capitalist crisis; or in other countries (like Ukraine) where ruling class party formations have changed alignment within the context of larger, regional and global political shifts.

In 1994, the US state began an aggressive phase of NATO expansion into Eurasia reflected in Bill Clinton’s ominous declaration in 1999 that a “gray zone of insecurity must not reemerge in Europe.” Clinton and George Bush ushered an era of expansion and enlargement of the anti-Russian war pact by negating the prior pledge made to the contrary. They absorbed the fragments of the former USSR and Warsaw Pact to the point of buffeting up along the western border of Russia. Other subsidiary agreements and the military invasion and colonization of Iraq further opened a corridor opening into the Indian Ocean. This penetrative path-clearing further circuited NATO forces into Central Asia and the Indo-Pacific region through the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. This progress allowed for the US to construct an expansive gridwork of bases and military capacity with the aim of buttressing regional Russian imperial ambitions, suppling and enforcing the long occupation of Afghanistan, to surround and “contain” Iran, and to implant beachhead positions against rising China.[ii]

Remapping through war and terror

This project was further accompanied by a campaign to remake the strategically invaluable Middle East and into Central Asia, starting with Iraq and the attempt to topple Saddam Hussein after his Baathist regime invaded and occupied Kuwait in 1990. In January of 1991, the US unleashed “Operation: Desert Shield,” a military invasion into the region that culminated into the largest aerial bombardment of civilian populations since the US-led carpet-bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia. The calculated destruction of infrastructure in Iraq was then followed up with the invention and enforcement of the so-called “no-fly zone,” where the US and allied air power conducted an average of 34,000 military sorties per year. This “closing of the skies” was used to give the imperial coalition total air supremacy, to further identify and destroy a broad range of civilian and military targets, and effectively ground Iraq’s civilian air traffic for the following twelve years. The war from above was accompanied by genocidal sanctions against the Iraqi people, a noose-tightening process that has been attributed to the death of more than one million men, women, and children—all in the name of forcing “regime change.” The sanctions were part of a total financial and trade embargo that was imposed by the UN Security Council through resolution and locked in place until 2003, when the US decided to invade and occupy Iraq directly, decapitate the regime, capture its national oil, and install a compliant puppet state.

After the attacks of September 11^th, 2001, the US state pivoted to Afghanistan. Congress dutifully vetted the rush to war with the passage of “Operation Enduring Freedom” in October 2001, and the “global war on terrorism” was officially declared to the watching world. The US state launched its first full-scale ground invasion and catastrophic military occupation of Afghanistan, which Bush defined as a “generational global war on terrorism” including an absurdist 2002 State of the Union spectacle where he subsequently identified the next targets as the “Axis of Evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea).

By February of 2003, this forward momentum was then plowed into the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The groundwork for the second war was originally laid by the Clinton Administration and Congress in 1998, with the passage of the “Iraq Liberation Act.” It was then continued under Bush with the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq” in October 2002 as US troops were just landing in Afghanistan. The full invasion and occupation of Iraq was finally stamped for approval with the declaration of “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” in early 2003. The war was executed under the false and fabricated claim that the US had to pre-emptively strike Iraq to block the development and use of existing stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

While undergoing name change and makeovers, the war has persisted into the present as US troops and aligned forces continue to conduct “counterterrorism operations” in 85 countries.

In the process of the build-up to a second War on Iraq, the Bush administration cobbled together a dubious “Coalition of the Willing” through bullying, payoffs, and horse-trading, after much of the world’s governments and populations had turned against a second Gulf War and the impending disaster and mayhem that lay in store. The Bush Administration even threatened the recalcitrant coup regime of Pervez Musharraf that it would bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” if that country did not cooperate with the logistics of invasion in Afghanistan. To cajole the Turkish government to allow for the use of its bases to invade Iraq amid tumultuous nationwide protests in opposition, the US offered the government a $15 billion aid package—a bribe the government couldn’t refuse. However, many others did opt out; especially the Russian and Chinese states which have had their own interests, alliances, and arrangements with Iraq and most of the other countries drawn into the crosshairs of US military operations. For instance, the machinations of war carried over into Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and elsewhere. While undergoing name change and makeovers, the war has persisted into the present as US troops and aligned forces continue to conduct “counterterrorism operations” in 85 countries.

Death pangs of the Pax Americana

The realpolitik of exerting mafioso-like political muscle in order to coerce or bribe into compliance a motley assortment of “allies” to stand with the US, revealed the first real stress-tests of the US-centric order. The Atlassian endeavor to remake the global order in such invasive and forceful strokes occurred in an interregnum of unipolarity within the imperialist system, where declining and rising regional imperialist states had to build or rebuild their regional power within the hegemonic geopolitical framework dictated by the United States. Nevertheless, the elbowing force of unrivaled military prowess has been neither sufficient to ensure victory on the battlefield nor has it been sufficient substitute for the declining gravitational pull of US economic power on an international scale; or for the receding political influence necessary to shepherd or inspire allegiance or compliance from vacillating and erstwhile allies.

The eventual defeat inflicted on the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan has shattered the illusion of immutability and permanence of North American power. The once unified center of geopolitical gravity is decentralizing and drifting.[iii] Deep and prolonged crisis is wracking the functionality of capitalism internationally, and especially destabilizing at its weakest links between and within nations. Class warfare in the form of the state-led transfer of social wealth from the poor to the rich to shore up the profitability for national capitalist classes is pressurizing social polarization, driving fractious inequality, generalized impoverishment and precarity, and dislocation and mass displacement. Crisis is further permutating in myriad forms and decomposing and recomposing political parties and state architectures–whether in bourgeois democratic, authoritarian, or despotic systems.

Taken together, these changes have produced the torsion, risen temperatures, and weakened structural integrity within the framework of the current imperial order. In turn, changes at the cellular level metastasize and spread throughout the organs more rapidly when under duress; creating the space and opportunity for previously united or programmatically intertwined states, alliances, and capitalist investitures to devolve in qualitative breaks that induce dissimulation, decoupling, and eventually armed, competitive confrontation. This provides context for how the major capitalist states have been building up their military capacity in liminal preparation for the inevitable shake-ups that are now occurring.

World military expenditure in 2020 is estimated to be $2 trillion, the highest level since 1988 and the winding down of the Cold War arms race. Over this period, the five largest arms exporters in 2021 were the United States, Russia, France, China and Germany; collectively accounting for 77 percent of all arms exports. The US and European states together accounted for 87 percent of all global arms exports, with the US and Russia accounting for nearly 60 percent of that total. The US gives or sells weapons to 103 states around the globe, while Russia exports 61 percent of its arms to Asia and Oceania (providing 60 percent of total arms imports to China), 20 per to the Middle East, and 14 percent to Africa.

Since the renewed buildup for war over the last year, we have seen all major belligerents in the current conflict shift into gear to further augment their arsenals. The US has led the way, by far, recently passing through congress a combined war budget of $778 billion, “with nearly half of the additional funding earmarked to procure new ships, aircraft, and combat vehicles as well as pouring money into the development of emerging technologies and new military laboratories.” China has increased its 2022 war budget by 7.1 percent to $231 billion, Germany has more than doubled its war budget to 100 billion euros this year; an so on. If war is the extension of politics by other means, we are facing the opening stages of a period of volatile inter-imperialist war politics.

The inter-imperialist hydra

The Russian invasion occurs in the context of declining US power and a gradual rearguard retreat from global dominance. For instance, the US economy has declined as a percentage of global GDP from 40 percent in 1967 to 24 percent by 2019. Simultaneously, China’s has increased to 18 percent, the European Union 15.4 percent, with most other regional capitalist powers and alliances gaining larger shares through the process. The economy of Russia has dramatically declined since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The former USSR accounted for 20 percent of the world's economy in 1966, with Russia crumbling down to less than 2 percent during the financial crisis of 1998. By 2019 the economy was at three percent as a result of several years of debilitating Euro-American sanctions in response to its annexation of Crimea and interventions into the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. Nevertheless, the Russian state has utilized its substantial military power to overcome its economic deficiencies, and instrumentalized war and invasion to restore its accumulative processes through imperial reconquest.

While regional imperialist powers have had to previously navigate their own ambitions and trajectories within the parameters of a US-centric framework, they have in recent years become more active players in the context of regional redesign to enlarge their own spheres in the process.

As early as 1994, then Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed onto the Clinton-led “Partnership for Peace,” an adjacent-status category to NATO that enabled collaboration without requiring full membership. In 2001, Putin proposed a new pan-European security pact to include Russia in the in the global war on terrorism framework, which he imagined could replace NATO and align their shared interests of the time to allow Putin to stomp out oppositional movements in the former Russian empire. Under this borrowed pretense, Russia carried out brutal scorched-earth operations to rebuild its regional empire in Chechnya (1994-2009); Tajikistan in (1992-1997); Dagestan (1999); Ingushetia (2007-2015); Georgia (2008); other regions in the Caucuses; and in Syria.

After being rebuffed by NATO, Russia and China signed a treaty of ''friendship and cooperation'' in 2001, binding the two governments closer in commitment to jointly oppose the Euro-American advance. The treaty enjoined Russia and China in formally in opposing NATO expansion eastward, and reinforced mutual support for their own regional roles and claims. Russia and China became more economically integrated, with bilateral trade doubling since 2014 and total trade increasing 35% to $146 billion in the last year alone and the goal of nearly doubling that again in the next two years. Russia has become a main supplier of high-technology weaponry, wheat, and oil to China; which has transitioned into the main financier and backer of Russia as Europe and the US began sanctioning and decoupling. By 2014, Russia had declared the Ukrainian government illegitimate and all actions taken by succeeding administrations as null and void—including previously established non-intervention agreements going back to 1994.

Burying Lenin, resurrecting the Tsar

While Putin was a well-placed apparatchik in the Soviet-era KGB bureaucracy, he renounced the “Communism” of the Soviet state, while retaining a lingering adoration for it authoritarian political character and imperialist legacy. As the front-man for the post-order Russian ruling class, he rehabilitated the Tsarist past, rekindled great Russian chauvinism, courted the far-right in Russia and internationally, and vowed to restore the empire by burying Lenin’s ideas and denouncing Bolshevik measures towards national self-determination–once and for all. The Russian state and the model of US-styled oligarchic capitalism he helped bring into existence, has endeavored to rebuild the great Russian empire with the hard power of cluster-bombs, T-14s, MIGs, and Kalashnikovs; while brutally repressing oppositional political movements and cracking down on independent media and journalists.

As the front-man for the post-order Russian ruling class, Putin rehabilitated the Tsarist past, rekindled great Russian chauvinism, courted the far-right in Russia and internationally, and vowed to restore the empire by burying Lenin’s ideas and denouncing Bolshevik measures towards national self-determination–once and for all.

Putin has constructed his own free-trade agreement with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan through the 2014 “Eurasian Economic Union;” and made arrangements with China. He has backed Russian-aligned, miniature-Stalinist autocrats across the region in their repression of popular uprisings; sending tanks and troops to repress the people of Kazakhstan, and propping up the teetering regime in Belarus. His further aggressions towards Ukraine are rooted in Russia’s replacement by the US as its imperial backer, along with the EU as its regional proxy.

Victorious from the Cold War, the US state engineered the Budapest Agreements of 1994 along with the EU and with a now-cornered and temporarily defanged Russia. Through the agreements, the parties administered the denuclearization of Ukraine in exchange for mutual non-intervention and security agreements. Through this transition, the US state began the process of becoming the primary financial provider and military sponsor of the Ukrainian state, funneling an average of about $300 million in aid per year from 1994-2015 and up to $600 million annually from 2015-2020 in the aftermath of the breakdown of the Minsk Agreements. Most recently, the US state has fast-tracked a $200 million shipment in weapons to Ukraine and allocated and emergency military-economic package of $13.6 billion.

Over this period, Ukraine and Russia began to decouple and detach economically. Trade between Ukraine and Russia shrunk by about 70 percent between 2012 and 2018 amid the Russian occupation of Crimean and instigated border wars; with EU countries and China picking up most of the slack and Europe filling the energy gaps created by the complete shutoff of Russian gas to Ukraine in 2014. A general economic reorientation towards the west was consolidated with the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement signed in 2017. Ukraine’s entrance was previously blocked by then pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, until he was overthrown in the Maiden Revolution in 2014. The agreement brought Ukraine into the free-trade orbit of Western Europe and formalized its entry and integration into the EU sphere of influence; a move that was seen at the time as a precursor to eventually joining into the EU. A flurry of financial warfare has followed in succession, and rapidly multiplied and exacerbated since the invasion, setting up the global capitalist economy for its third significant downturn and crisis in just over two decades.

Spiraling financial warfare and the next global economic crisis

After Putin’s forceful annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and separatist sponsorship in the Donbas region, the United States and the EU began to apply sanctions against Russia to debilitating affect. By 2015, the ruble lost half its value against the U.S. dollar, requiring the Russian Central Bank to backfill and stabilize the currency. The experience of economic shock led the Russian state to begin stockpiling a war chest of over $630 billion in gold and foreign currencies, especially as the major imperialist players jockeyed into war position. In the aftermath of the invasion, the US and its international allies have frozen over half of the Russian reserves held within their banking systems.

Russia is the third largest producer of oil, and the second largest producer of natural gas in the world. Russian exports account for 11 percent of total global oil consumption and 17 percent of global gas consumption. Before the invasion, Russia was the main supplier of petroleum to most European countries (30% of the EU's petroleum oil imports, and 39% of total gas imports; with more than 75% to Estonia, Poland, Slovakia and Finland), providing about 40 percent of Russia's total federal budget revenue.

To further weaken Russia, the Biden Administration began to take active measures in late 2021 to oppose a Russian-German joint venture to build the $11 billion dollar Nordstream pipeline complex, a project designed to route and pump natural gas directly from Russia to Germany vis-à-vis the Baltic Sea. Believing that it would eventually give Russia too much leverage over Western European and NATO countries, the US pushed Germany to scrap the project by threatening to issue sanctions against involved parties, starting with Russian investors.

Facing a growing catalogue of economic sanctions that were greatly weakening the Russian economy, Putin opted for a US-styled preemptive invasion and war in Ukraine. After the shutdown of the Nordstream pipeline project, he began amassing troops along Ukraine’s eastern border. In short order, the United States and twelve aligned European nations responded by shipping military hardware and provisions to the Ukrainian government and dispatching troops to Ukraine-bordering NATO countries. The US sent 15,000 additional troops to increase the total number of US military personnel in the region to over 100,000. The chess-like brinkmanship, turned full-throttled Russian invasion, then unleashed a spasmodic orgy of financial warfare that is now triggering the next global financial crisis.

The US, EU and UK has since slapped sanctions on 400 public and private individuals and 600 financial and political institutions, including major political figures. Russian multinational banks have also been removed from the SWIFT International payment system, disrupting payment and income systems throughout the economy. Despite the rhetoric of these actions targeting and punishing the rich, the expanding sanction complex and financial disinvestment will result in disproportionately harming and displacing the Russian working classes through increasing unemployment, spiking food inflation, and a broad range of other multiplier effects.

Before the invasion, the failing mechanisms of international capitalism were already leading to social crisis. Consumer inflation hit 8% in US, 9% in Russia, nearly 6% in EU; while hitting the astronomical rate 54% in Turkey. In a matter of days after the invasion, and after even more sweeping sanctions were imposed, the value of the ruble began to further collapse. This chain of events induced a 13% spike in costs for basic foods for the average Russian. Furthermore, bond default risk has increased and the Moscow stock exchange was shut down to prevent a financial meltdown. One study estimated that the escalation to a full trade war would curb the combined gross domestic product of the Europe/US countries by 2 percent, while impacting Russian economy by a devastating 10 percent. The Russian state and the rich and comfortable have hoarded their gold, leaving millions of Russian people exposed the dire consequences of economic shock and the potential collapse of systems that provide for basic alimentary, health, employment, and other income-based needs.

The US ban on all oil and gas imports from Russia has already sent shockwaves through international markets, with multinational oil company executives and investors responding by raising prices and through widespread price gouging as people are held captive to oil and gas-based modes of transportation. Rising costs are already rippling through European manufacturing, agricultural, transport, construction, and other economic sectors. Economists predict that if Russia cuts of oil and gas to Europe, it would result in an immediate global recession. In anticipation of this possibility, some European capitalist states like France are already gearing up billion-dollar financial bailouts in the form of subsidies for firms, investors, and consumers who will be squeezed in the advent of a Russian energy disruption.

The spiral of financial warfare will catalyze and amplify even more devastating effects and consequences for formerly colonized nations and those historically under-developed by imperialism and previous episodes of imperialist war and capitalist crisis.

The spiral of financial warfare will catalyze and amplify even more devastating effects and consequences on formerly colonized nations and those historically under-developed by imperialism and previous episodes of imperialist war and capitalist crisis. For examples, any disruption of Ukrainian or Russian exports will have a disastrous impact on other parts of the world that are dependent on their food-based commodities. Russia and Ukraine together exported more than a quarter of the world’s wheat in 2019. For example, Ukraine accounts for 90 per cent of Lebanon’s wheat imports and is also a leading supplier for countries including Somalia, Syria, Philippines, and Libya. Egypt is the world’s biggest importer of wheat, spending more than $4 billion annually on Russian and Ukrainian wheat imports to feed its population of over 100 million. Russia is also a provider of wheat to Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Yemen. After grain prices spiked in 2007 and 2008 due to severe global production declines, protests spread through nearly 40 countries from Haiti to the Ivory Coast. Furthermore, another increase in grain prices in 2009-10 is regarded as a driving factor of the Arab Spring uprisings and revolutions in the Middle East that spread across the region beginning in 2011.

Much of the world’s working classes, oppressed nationalities, and poor were already facing persistent crisis and hardship before the war in Ukraine. For instance, seven primarily African nations were already in deep economic insolvency and turmoil, another twenty-nine countries (in Africa, Asia, Middle East, and Latin America) were sliding in that direction; and another 24 countries were experiencing moderate risk of economic crisis before the invasion; this due to war and occupation and massive and burdensome debts accumulated from international banks and investors during the last cycle of imperialist war, free-trade-based displacement, and contraction and downturn in the capitalist economy. These regions of the world will again be hit the hardest by the next cycle.

The effects of widening war

In the first phase of the Russian war on Ukraine, we are witnessing the mass slaughter of people unable to flee, and a mass exodus of those that can. In the span of less than 2 weeks, over 2.7 million people have been turned into refugees who are fleeing for their lives; and a total evacuation of up to ten million could occur over the course of the months ahead. Europe is already experiencing an increase in refugee arrivals from Afghanistan, especially as the two-decade’s long US invasion and occupation has left the country in ruins, with over 22 million people facing famine and destitution. This occurs alongside a continued stream of refugees fleeing from beleaguered countries and regions in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

The mega-displacement now happening is already emboldening and providing fuel for the fascist, far-right, and anti-immigrant political movements vying for dominance across Europe and other parts of the world. Ukrainian refugees are already being blocked and turned away at the US-Mexico border, as the Biden Administration has refused to allow their entry by utilizing an archaic, exclusionary health stipulation of racist origin called “Title 42” that Trump enacted to effectively close the southern border to asylum-seeking people arriving from the south. Since enacted, this policy has been used to sanction the deportation of more than 1.6 million adults and children who have attempted to seek asylum through previously legal means; and send them back to Mexico, Central America, Haiti, various African nations, and other nations of origin.

The scale of casualty and mass displacement in Ukraine is adding to what has already occurred as part of the “war on terrorism”. A 2021 report from the Costs of War project at Brown University revealed that 20 years of post-9/11 wars have cost the U.S. an estimated $8 trillion and have killed more than 900,000 people, while displacing an estimated 37 million people.

The US-initiated declaration of global war that began with the bunker-bombing of the Tora Bora in Afghanistan in late 2001 is now entering its third decade—and into its second major act; albeit this time with a Russian imperialist riposte of its own. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought the largest, tested, and most destructive military powers into each other’s range and view. For this intensifying drama, there is no denouement, or closure, in sight. We are entering into the next-generational continuation of a long and potentially existential conflict. That is, unless the people on all sides rise up, resist, and eventually topple its very foundations.

NOTES

[i] For an academic analysis of the “Bush Doctrine” and aligned thinking see Robert Jervis, “Understanding the Bush Doctrine” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 118, No. 3 (Fall, 2003), pp. 365-388; Walter LaFeber, “The Bush Doctrine” Diplomatic History, Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2002, Pages 543–558; and SourceWatch, “Project for the New American Century” Center for Media and Democracy. Available online at https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Project_for_the_New_American_Century.

[ii] For a comprehensive US military-imperialist perspective of the rise of China in the Asia-Pacific, see Pankaj Jha, “China in the South Pacific an Emerging Theater of Rivalry” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, Winter 2019 available online at https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/JIPA/journals/Volume-02_Issue-4/Jha.pdf.

[iii] Saudi Arabia and Turkey are emblematic of this process. Saudi Arabia and Turkey have exhibited their ambitions both in operation with the US, and in an incrementally semi-autonomous manner. This has included a trajectorial and subordinate partnership with the US in conducting regime change and invasion and occupation operations in Afghanistan and Iraq; in opposing and countering Iran’s regional efforts and ambitions; and as a counter-revolutionary bulwark against the Arab Spring revolutions—which both violently repressing their own populations as part of the project. The Saudi Arabian monarchical state has operated semi-independently in conducting its own imperialist actions in Somalia, Bahrain, and Yemen; while Turkey has done the same in Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian Kurdistan; as well as in Libya and Syria.

Justin Akers Chacón is an educator, activist, and writer in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. His recent works include No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis, Haymarket Books, 2nd edition, 2018), and Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket Books, 2018), and The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border (Haymarket Books: 2021).