The Violence of Revival

In Britain as in other Western countries, the largest mobilisations of recent years have not been against rising prices or stagnant wages or failing services, but against a genocide that’s happening elsewhere. The scale of the revolt upends the notion that anti-imperialist consciousness is especially elusive in the imperial metropole. For the masses who have marched, boycotted and blockaded for Palestine, it seems to be a spontaneous impulse. Many have personal ties to the region that is being immolated with the help of British weapons and intelligence; many more can see the reality of our ruling consensus by the light of its burning embers.

While there are echoes of the 2003 anti-war movement in the civil disobedience and student occupations of the 2020s, this dissidence has not simply been handed down. Its intensity says something about the particular mutations of empire over the past decade. If the grand conflict between capital and labour seems to have ‘stuttered and halted’ in the Global North after serial working-class defeats, as Gabriel Winant wrote in our last issue, this other wheel of history appears to be accelerating: the aggression of the core and the eruption of resistance.

This dynamic is often obscured both by liberals and the left: the first panics at the rise of a new authoritarian front, treating Trump, Putin and Xi as much the same phenomenon; the second can be too quick to declare the inevitability of American decline — failing to take stock of the empire’s many lethal and effective survival strategies.

The main propulsive force here is rather the self-subverting tendency of US-led globalisation and Washington’s violent response to it. The US won the Cold War in part by shuttering its factories and pivoting to finance, gaining access to infinite credit flows that allowed it to beat the Soviets in the arms race. That meant relying on faraway countries to produce the stuff of consumer abundance. China, more than any other, rose to meet this need. By offering itself up as the low-waged workshop of the world, it forged a temporary harmony of interests between elites in both nations. Yet the CCP always saw this as a transitional programme, not a final goal. It would use its spectacular capitalist growth spurt to break out of its assigned role in the global division of labour: to produce the high-value products and cultivate the strategic alliances that would put it on an independent path to development.

This, of course, is unacceptable in a world-system that demands full subordination to American interests. And so the two Great Powers were set on the collision course that Benjamin Bürbaumer describes below — as the ‘unipolar’ capitalism of the new millennium turned into the ‘bipolar’ one we see today. In allowing China to carve out semi-autonomous spheres of influence, a transnational order of Washington’s own making gradually became a threat to its supremacy. The architecture built to support American empire began to contain it.

This enabled a certain strain to rise to the top of American political life: a restorationist ambition to return to an age of total dominance by ripping up the rules and norms and institutions that once sustained Washington’s influence. The centre of imperial power has turned on its old supports, from ‘free trade’ to international law to the UN. This shift was already underway with Biden, who tried to strangle China’s tech industry before using his final flickers of mental agility to become a late-blooming genocidaire. But Trump has pushed it further still.

The hard-right Republican Party understands the present paradox of empire: America remains the most formidable power on the planet, which pockmarks every continent with military bases and wields global finance as a weapon, but which is no longer automatically served by the ‘rules-based order’ (of which China has become the principal defender). Trumpism is an attempt to resolve this contradiction through tariffs, sanctions, bombings, invasions, kidnappings and assassinations.

MAGA Republicans realise that the current interregnum, in which China is expanding its role in the technologies and value chains of the future, is the crucial time to act — forcing other states to fall in line and pushing the frontiers of accumulation before it is too late. Hence the title of this issue, which is both a panorama of imperialism today and an analysis of this specific strand of voluntarist grand strategy that Trump embodies: the president wants an empire, and he wants it now. It is not enough to rule the world as it is; a new world must be made to nourish an old unipolarity.

Trump’s voluntarism is also a kind of vanguardism, as Andreas Malm writes in his landmark essay on what he calls ‘ultra-fossil empire’. Lusting after new sites of plunder — most notably the oil fields protected from American exploitation by sovereignist projects in Venezuela and Iran — the US government runs ahead of its own capitalist firms to prise open foreign markets. While Chevron and ExxonMobil hand-wring over profitability, Trumpism raises the banner and charges forward, convinced that brute strength will create the energy windfalls that will shore up American primacy. ‘Trump offering Venezuela to stunned CEOs’, writes Malm, ‘is somewhat like Lenin seizing power and giving it to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets’: an agent of purified class power that takes every opportunity to advance.

This creates a unique alignment with Israel: a vanguard power par excellence, which has long exceeded Washington in its aspiration to transform West Asia into nothing more than an imperial garrison, snuffing out any residual movements for self-determination, but has generally been reined in by more cautious American leaders — right up until 2023, when Biden cosigned its exterminationist plan for Gaza, and then 2026, when Trump and Netanyahu joined hands to pulverise Iran. This convergence is captured by Tribune’s regular contributor Nihal El Aasar in her stunning piece on Zionism, which she describes as a form of regional class war that grants Arab elites entry to the imperial system at the expense of Arab workers — ‘peace with Israel’ becoming a proxy for ‘demobilising the masses and securing their respect for established power, even as it unleashes more sadistic violence than ever before.’

The problem with this imperial vanguardism — the production of new realities through force of will — is twofold. It unleashes monstrous atrocities that give rise to opposition, both from people in the firing line and from citizens of perpetrator states, as Ansarallah disrupts shipping routes in the Bab al-Mandab and Palestine Action smashes up Elbit factories in Kent. And it creates situations of extreme volatility, as America’s attempts to break the fetters of the world-system end up casting it into a realm of brutal contingency, where sudden crises and sharp reversals are common. The attempt to transcend structure with event sets off a series of chain reactions, like Riyadh airport going up in smoke or price rises toppling political leaders, which Pentagon war planners struggle to predict.

The outcome is a landscape of jagged and contested power relations that escape much of the left’s standard vocabulary. This is not a simple trajectory of ‘decline’, but rather a deeply uneven revivalism. It is not a case of ‘inter-imperial conflict’ — there is still only one empire that merits the word — nor of ‘hegemony’ morphing into ‘domination’, since Trumpist coercion is practised alongside consensual forms of rule in dozens of states that remain eager as ever to swap their sovereignty for patronage.

The centrepiece of this issue is a study of eleven ‘Battlegrounds’ — from North Africa to Latin America, South Asia to the Persian Gulf — where this volatility is on display, as imperial worldmaking tries to bulldoze seemingly objective limits and flatten popular resistance. In each case, conditions on the ground undermine linear narratives of American empire’s rise or fall. At one end of the spectrum is the apparent US victory in Caracas, where Maduro’s ouster seems to have created a pliant energy colony — but may have also spawned the conditions for chavismo to reemerge. On the other is the failed regime-change operation in Tehran, which punctured the delusions of the warmongers while at the same time generating superprofits for US oil giants, such that fossil empire can snatch partial victory from the jaws of defeat.

Between these poles, other nations in the crosshairs (Cuba, India, Lebanon, Syria) tell a story of creative adaptation. Washington is refining its methods for this decisive historical moment and its victims are trying to outrun them. Perhaps the Palestine movement, as well as being driven by instinctive revulsion at the savagery of vanguard states, has also been galvanised by this powerful sense of urgency and contingency. If US imperialism feels that its fortunes depend on immediate action, this surely gives direction to all those who dream of its downfall. Now is the pivotal time for both sides. The outcome of their collision cannot be foreordained.

Ed Miliband’s announcement of tougher sanctions on Israeli settlers has proved the impact of mass internationalist pressure. But while his aim is to appease the public, the effect should be to embolden them, not just to press for more meaningful interventions on Palestine, but to develop a vision of the country beyond its sub-imperial status — rejecting the cult of blind compliance with the White House and its many corrosive consequences, which are set out in our opening section on the ‘Home Front’. American planes take off from RAF Fairford to bomb Iran. Across a network of military and intelligence hubs, Britain hosts more American soldiers and spies than almost anywhere else in the world, and our government admits that hundreds more are hidden on this island. American aircraft carriers refuel on Diego Garcia, land that Britain stole and leased to the USA. BAE Systems, headquartered in London, has over 7,000 workers greasing the wheels of empire in Saudi Arabia.

Breaking the Special Relationship now takes on a new necessity. History does not follow a neat arc and decline is not the next inevitable chapter; politics is made up of immediate challenges, and ours is to confront American imperial revivalism in unstable times that present new openings for smaller powers to destabilise the troubled hegemon. The fact that socialists in Britain will remain institutionally fragmented over the coming period, scattered across different parties and trade unions and campaign groups, makes it even more important to converge on this vital principle: that loyalty to a death-dealing empire brings no benefit, and increasing our military spending on its command — while defunding what little remains of the social state — is an act of criminal derangement. There can be no effective left without a sober recognition of this truth.