The Age of Hyper-Imperialism
A new report redraws the terrifying lines of global power.
Global events sometimes seem like a lethal chaos — violent, intermittently explosive, but without pattern or shape. Western forces seem more like terrified tank crews in the nighttime jungle, high on hallucinogens and firing blindly at anything that moves.
Even to their own citizens, the actions of Western governments seem to lack clear goals. Why invade Iraq? Why back Israel’s murderous violations of international law — even if, as is the case with Joe Biden, it may turn out to be political suicide? The list of seemingly incomprehensible actions goes on and on.
Campaigns like Manifest Destiny or the Cold War were tragic and murderous, but at least it was clear what they were after. What’s driving Western powers today?
The Tricontinental Institute for Social Research recently published a report on what it calls “Hyper-Imperialism.” While the report raises as many or more questions as it answers — it couldn’t do otherwise — I consider it an important step toward understand the current stage of global power.
The authors define “hyper-imperialism” as “imperialism conducted in an exaggerated and kinetic way.” The authors comment that:
“The spasmodic quality of its exertion is felt by the millions of Congolese, Palestinians, Somalis, Syrians, and Yemeni living under US militarism whose heads instinctively jerk for cover at sudden sounds.”
They say a dying animal is the most dangerous creature of them all. The same may be true of empires.
Here are some excerpts from the report:
“Hegemony is historically lost in three stages: production, finance, and military.”
“The United States has lost hegemony in production, though it still has some remaining areas of technological hegemony, including those related to the military. It is seeing its financial hegemony challenged, though still in the very early stages …”
"Without productive power and knowing that its financial power is at a tipping point, the full suite of imperial technologies and control that the US had is no longer at its disposal, therefore it's channeling its power through the mechanisms it has left, culture, the control of truth, and war.”
“The Palestinian people in Gaza are certainly feeling the palpable barbarity of NATO+ and the forced ‘mass consensus’ of which the Global North is capable.”
The staggering extent of Western military expenditure is illustrated in the chart below, which I have taken from the report.
But the report deals with non-military aggression, too:
“It is not a matter of exaggeration to say that the Global North has declared a state of open hostility and war on any section of the Global South that does not comply with the policies of the Global North. This is seen in the joint declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation published on 9 January 2023: ‘We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.’”
The analogy of a wildfire came to mind as I read it. What firefighters fear most is the moment when the firestorms scattered across a landscape come together and form a mega-conflagration that is far more difficult to contain. The more common metaphor of a runaway train ( a troop train, in this case) also came to mind.
This is not to say that I was discouraged by the report. Far from it. There is a growing movement to resist the Global North in this effort, both in the West and globally. For that movement to succeed, however, it will need both information (facts and figures) and understanding (‘pattern recognition’ regarding the forces that are battering our world). This report is an excellent step forward on both fronts.
I interviewed Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, one of the report’s authors. That video is below:
So the leaders of Russia, Belarus, Iran, the Taliban, the Wagner Group, the Houthis, Hizbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab are all helpless, innocent victims? For lack of a better metaphor, isn’t that somewhat black and white? 14 centuries of Islamic invasions, conquests, bloodthirsty rampaging, enslaving, raping, massacring every nation that refused to accept the yoke of Islam? And now the 1.8 billion, nuclear-armed, oil-rich, woman-hating, gay-and-Jew killing Islamists are playing victim? Come on, Richard. The Anglo-American fossil fuel and military Apartheid loving kleptocracy is horrific, but compared to Genghis Khan, Suleiman, the Pashas, the Iraqi, Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian, Palestinian allies of Hitler and Stalin, Khomeini, or Putin, Hamas, the Houthis and the Taliban? They’re total green peas, beginners.
With all due respect, this article would have been an incisive and brilliant exposition had it been written in the late 1960’s. Indeed, after American military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, a CIA sponsored coup in Greece in 1967, and when America was pummeling Indochina with napalm, crop defoliants, and antipersonnel weapons, a galvanizing indictment against rapacious and violent Western Imperialism made all the sense in the world.
Although bright people should have nimble minds, academia suffers from ideational sclerosis. As it repeats its old slogans, it becomes wedded to archaic conceptions. Its thought become wooden, stiff and arthritic – and invalid.
The West no longer strides across the globe like a giant. The power of China, India and Brazil have risen dramatically. The augmentation of power in other states creates the ineluctable loss of power in the West.
Furthermore, your reference to Gaza is so blithely indifferent to so many factors that prove that Israel is acting in its own self defense: A) Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2004 and before withdrawing built factories in Gaza so it would earn money (The People of Gaza respond by invading Israel and committing horrifying atrocities, such as driving nails into women’s vaginas, documented by the NY Times); B) Israel offered to give up 96 percent of the West Bank and Arafat walked out of negotiation, C) no one said that Jordan and Egypt obstructed Palestinian self determination from 48 to 67 when they controlled the West bank and Gaza respectively, and equity demands that Israel not be castigated for muffling Palestinian autonomy. There are so many issues re Israel and Gaza, and no time to discuss them. I refer you to a few of my articles on substack.
Also, the West has created within the West mechanisms to undermine the West and buttress the adored and fetishized third world. In most of our universities, DEI, affirmative action and the inculcation of a masochistic culture of white guilt is subverting thought and induing the West to make more and more concessions to the third world.
The Marxists of old had some good points: They called our attention to class war, and a revolution of the poor would better the living standards of poor whites as well as poor blacks. However, the retrograde false left of contemporary academia, for the most, only care about color – and other usually immutable conditions They seem to be aching for Rassenkrieg, or what the Germans called race war. I will support the Western verities and values over the muck and mayhem of the third world any day of the week.