The US was the dominant imperialist force in the post World War II era. It managed the transition from the direct colonies – literally owned and controlled by England, France and Germany – to the neo-colonies, where the newly independent nations entered the world economy. Then began the transition to the global capitalist economy that is still forming up today. In this era, US policies and national demands dominated the formation of the current structure of world finance – the World Bank, the IMF and the World Court, most of which was created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1945. The US is well aware that these relics of the Industrial Era are becoming outmoded and less functional.
Every President since the US first dropped the atom bomb on Japan has threatened to use nuclear weapons. The risks of nuclear war, in tandem with the massive global wars against civilians, are certainly real. There are specific issues that should be considered.
(1) The US has always signaled that it will go it alone, reserving, for one thing, the right to nuke other countries in “American national interests.” The US has also demonstrated its capacity to make sudden dramatic decisions that restructure international relations without considering its “allies.” In 1971, for example, President Nixon, suddenly and without notice, took the US off the gold standard to let the value of the dollar float. Then they maneuvered the ensuing economic ferment to get oil traded in dollars, thereby establishing it as the international currency.
Such a move was not the result of impulse or a confused mind. It was the implementation of policies, the ramifications of which were well discussed ahead of time. Then in 2001, as the first and most immediate response to 911, the US unilaterally seized the most valuable air force base in the world by going to war with Afghanistan. Bagram AFB in Kabul is a global warfare trump card. For one thing, it dominates the economies of Asia and Europe. The base is a mere 20-minute Mach 2 jet bomber flight from the Straights of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, the Caspian Sea energy complexes and the Straights of Malacca at the bottom of Malaysia. These are the choke points for the oil that is essential for the economies of Europe, China and Japan. The base also directly threatens the nuclear research sites for China, Russia, Pakistan, India and Israel, all a short flight away.
It is a mistake not to grasp the implications of this move. It too was thought out ahead. Russia, China and Europe are not fooled about the significance of these moves. Add to this that the US for decades has spent more on the military than the next ten most militarized countries. These are not the acts of a country that is losing its power. The world’s economic powers are well aware of the futility of attacking the US.
(2) Obama began a massive upgrade of both nuclear weapons and the US basic nuclear bomber, the B 61, by 2023 for a cost of $325 billion. Experts confidently expect this to rise to over $1 trillion by the time of completion. The 3 delivery systems – planes, subs and missiles – will be also upgraded for trillions more. This will likely compel another weapons race with both China and Russia.
Obama did not reverse Bush’s nuclear doctrine, though he certainly augmented it with the new technology of drones. After 2011, George Bush the second articulated new US “defense” doctrine: pre-emptive war, offensive deterrence. The dramatic changes in American policy that followed September 11th went far beyond any war on terror. They are comprehensively expressed in an official document, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” issued in September 2002.
Meanwhile it is reported that the US has moved nuclear weapons up to the border of Latvia and Russia, a complete violation of its 1997 pledge to not to install “permanent” and “significant” military forces in former Warsaw Pact countries. NATO’s current European strategy includes the use of nukes in Europe as a deterrent to war.
Conn Hallinan summarizes the situation this way:
“It is unlikely that NATO intends to attack Russia, but the power differential between the U.S. and Russia is so great—a “colossal asymmetry,’ Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Financial Times—that the Russians have abandoned their ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons pledge.
“It is the lack of clear lines that make the current situation so fraught with danger. While the Russians have said they would consider using small, tactical nukes if ‘the very existence of the state’ was threatened by an attack, NATO is being deliberately opaque about its possible tripwires. According to NATO Review, nuclear ‘exercises should involve not only nuclear weapons states…but other non-nuclear allies,’ and ‘to put the burden of the doubt on potential adversaries, exercises should not point at any specific nuclear thresholds.’
“In short, keep the Russians guessing. The immediate problem with such a strategy is: what if Moscow guesses wrong?” Conn Hallinan, The Big Boom: Nukes And NATO,” July 22, 2016.
Michael Hudson adds these points:
“As a matter of fact, what NATO is trying to do is to goad Russia into building up an army so the US can undercut its [Russia’s] economy by diverting more and more resources away from the economy towards the military. Russia’s not falling for it. Putin said that Russia has no intention of mounting a land army. It is unthinkable that it could even want to invade the Baltics or Poland.
“But Putin did say that Russia has one means of retaliation. That’s atomic bombs. Atomic weapons are basically defensive. They’re saying that they don’t need an army anymore. Nor does any country need an army if they have an atomic weapon, because if you attack them, they can wipe you out. And they’ll be wiped out, too, but no nation is going to be able to conquer them. No country, really, can conquer any other country in today’s world. That means that Russia can’t conquer Europe by invading and occupying it.
“The U.S. strategy is to prevent neutrality. Europe’s economic interest is to achieve neutrality with Russia, and have economic unity so that there’s little chance of any confrontation with Russia as there is among the European countries themselves.” Michael Hudson, “US-NATO Border Confrontation with Russia Risks Nuclear War and Loss of European Partners,” July 18, 2016.
(3) Modern theorists of war recognize that warfare has both linear and non-linear aspects. The instabilities of the capitalist system, the manias of nationalism and belligerent neo-cons always bear the possibilities that someone might spontaneously initiate nuclear war. The bigger questions, however, are strategic. These touch on, as always, what the US is trying to engineer internationally.
As we see from the above analysis, the US has launched global counter-insurgency warfare in order to:
(a) facilitate the power of finance to privatize all of the property of the public, the power of science, agriculture and every means of production, and
(b) to police the global new class.
There is a third objective.
From Davos, to the World Bank to Silicon Valley and Washington DC, Transnational Capital has also set other goals for Globalization, which is far from complete and is constantly being revolutionized by new technologies and means of production, such as Big Data and the Internet of Things. TNC is planning to invest in, engineer and establish a new, smart, and privatized, global infrastructure. The infrastructure of the Industrial Era is both antiquated and relative unproductive, given the possibilities that exist with electronic technology. This is a fertile ground for the financial industry to control.
From the World Bank:
“Over the next 15 years, the global economy will require an estimated $89 trillion in infrastructure investments across cities, energy, and land-use systems, and $4.1 trillion in incremental investment for the low-carbon transition to keep within the internationally agreed limit of a 2 degree Celsius temperature rise.
“In addition, developed countries are working to meet a commitment made in 2010 to mobilize $100 billion a year from public and private sources by 2020 for climate mitigation and adaptation in developing countries. Showing the pathways to that $100 billion commitment will be important for building trust and confidence around the Paris climate negotiations that are expected to produce a new international agreement later this year.”
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2015/04/18/raising-trillions-for-climate-finance
The US has already made serious commitments to develop public-private investment partnerships to radically upgrade US infrastructure. Efforts to privatize education around the globe as well as to seize essential resources like water and land are also infrastructure issues. So, in addition to the two strategic goals above, it is clear that TNC has a third goal for globalization of developing infrastructure for the 21st century.
The merger of corporations and the State also has serious strategic implications. Google’s Eric Schmidt chairs the Pentagon’s committee for developing new technologies. Silicon Valley envisions expanding smart-phone technologies in all directions, from driverless cars to cloud computing. These TNC impulses add other issues to their strategic goals. Hence, the new concept of cyber war: “cyberwar is less a way to achieve a winning advantage in battle than a means of covertly attacking the enemy’s homeland infrastructure without first having to defeat its land, sea, and air forces in conventional military engagements.” (John Arquilla, “Cyber War is Here!” 2012.)
What would be the impact of nuclear war then on these strategic goals? Would a nuclear conflict between nations facilitate or hinder them? It certainly doesn’t appear to be part of Google’s business plan. World War in this sense is different than current US military strategy, and, it disrupts it. Nuclear war, with the presumed obliteration of millions of people, would have a profound effect on the consciousness of what is already a fairly unruly global new class. Just as the non-linear actions of individuals can suddenly dominate in the worldwide terror wars, so can the massive global horror at nuclear destruction create a qualitatively new situation. So far, at least, no one is proposing to launch a Nuclear Winter to counter Global Warming!
There are historic precedents for the restraining of nuclear war. The entire US military wanted to use nukes in both Korea and Vietnam, with the goal of then using them in the USSR or China. At each point, the strategic goals of capitalism prevented them from doing so. The US could not have achieved the reconstruction of Europe with the Marshall Plan or have managed the national liberation movements of the direct colonies if it were engaging in nuclear war.
The situation is similar today. Strategic concerns of TNC certainly are not achieved by the irresponsible use of nuclear weapons. As Alvin and Heidi Toffler wrote in War and Anti-War, “The way we make war reflects the way we make wealth.” The new wealth is through globalization. TNC is simply not going to sew and expand electronic production in India and Pakistan if they nuke each other.
Furthermore, new research on TNC by William Robinson, Dawn Paley and others reveals that the recent evolution of globalization, in the interests of global capitalists, has intertwined the issues still more.
From William Robinson, “Latin America, State Power and the Challenge to Global Capital,” 2006:
“Here we can see where my analysis of global capitalism differs from those of my critics. These critics see China’s increased relations with Latin America and interpret things from the old nation-state/inter-state centric framework. They say that China is competing with the US, emerging as a major rival to the US, which wants to defend its declining hegemony. That’s a classic framework; that’s the “New Imperialism” school.
“But what’s going on in China? And how is this linked to Latin America? An increasing portion of world industrial production has shifted into China. China is the industrial workhouse of the world. But this is the workhouse of transnational capital. When I say transnational capital that doesn’t mean capital from outside of China against capital inside of China. Transnational capital is just that – it’s transnational, meaning that the capitalist investment class operating in China are of Chinese, US, German, Japanese, Brazilian, South Africa, Thai, Indian, and Kuwaiti nationality, among many others. There are investors from all over the world. There are capitalist groups spread all over the world who are concentrating or globalizing capitalist accumulation inside China and for the obvious reasons that we already know – massive abundant cheap labor that is also educated, the largest agglomeration economy in the world, a state responsive to the conditions necessary for globalized accumulation, and so forth.
“So when China tries to expand its world markets for those goods pouring out of its global workhouse, it is not that the Chinese – people with Chinese passports and speaking Chinese – are competing against people from the US speaking English or people from France speaking French or from Japan speaking Japanese, all competing with one another trying to get new markets in Latin America. That is the classical framework of world capitalism in an earlier stage and it is not what is going on now. Rather, it is global capital trying to open up markets globally, to sustain an accumulation process in which the class contradictions are not national but transnational and in which the fiercest capitalist competition is not among national capitalist groups but among transnational conglomerates. This new global capitalism has a territorial expression particular to it because global capitalism “lands,” so to speak, or “zones in on” particular transnationalized territories, such as China’s coast, in order to accumulate for a phase of global accumulation. So again there’s no way you’re going to understand US-Chinese-Latin American relations from the old nation-state-centered framework. The argument that the US is trying to dominate Latin America and to ward off growing Chinese influence — that these two countries are competing for hegemony in Latin America – totally misses the point.
“Latin America is increasingly supplying raw materials to the workplace of the world in China, exporting to the Chinese coastal zones vast quantities of soy, copper, oil and so on. The old-style thinking concludes, ‘Latin America is breaking away from the US and it’s integrating into China and it’s the end of US hegemony.’ But that’s not what’s going on. When the copper goes from Chile to China or when the oil from Venezuela to China it’s going there to feed not ‘Chinese’ but global capitalism in China, to fuel transnational accumulation taking place in Chinese territory. These are not nation-state relations; they are global capitalist relations. If you want to understand Latin America’s transnational relations, its relationship to political processes and power structures worldwide, we need to develop a global capitalist and not a nation-state centric framework of analysis.”
And further – William Robinson, “Global Capitalism and the Global Police State: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism” Global Research, April 21, 2015
“Globalisation constitutes a qualitatively new epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked by a number of qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel articulations of social power. I highlight four aspects unique to this epoch.1
“First is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production and financial system into which all nations and much of humanity has been integrated, either directly or indirectly. We have gone from a world economy, in which countries and regions were linked to each other via trade and financial flows in an integrated international market, to a global economy, in which nations are linked to each more organically through the transnationalisation of the production process, of finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation.
“No single nation-state can remain insulated from the global economy or prevent the penetration of the social, political, and cultural superstructure of global capitalism. Second is the rise of a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), a class group that has drawn in contingents from most countries around the world, North and South, and has attempted to position itself as a global ruling class. This TCC is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Third is the rise of Transnational State (TNS) apparatuses. The TNS is constituted as a loose network made up of trans-, and supranational organizations together with national states. It functions to organise the conditions for transnational accumulation.
“The TCC attempts to organize and institutionally exercise its class power through TNS apparatuses. Fourth are novel relations of inequality, domination and exploitation in global society, including an increasing importance of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities.
“Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or collapse. How or where will it now expand?
“There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet of slums,” alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction – to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison- industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised gentrification, and so on;
“There is a disjuncture between a globalizing economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon”….”
Electronic technology is compelling rapid global development in many directions. It seems clear that the objective situation is far more nuanced that the now-simplistic analysis of imperialism from the Industrial Era. The situation is also changing fast, but it already seem to have gone beyond the old notions of nations competing with other nations to scarf up world resources for their national bourgeoisie. War in the 21st Century is a topic that will require far more study, but the features mentioned in all these analyses cannot be ignored. At this point, it seems pretty clear that any massive military strike by any country is subordinate to the goals of global TNC and international class warfare. At the same time, the expansion of the transnational shadow State is becoming a permanent feature.
The world is being transformed by electronic technology in ways that are only beginning to emerge. Emergent times demand above all that revolutionaries be good, be really good, at learning.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx described the general features of the current global situation with amazing accuracy in the Preface to The German Ideology. This outstanding application of scientific theory also underscores one of the challenges for revolutionaries today. Lenin articulated the essential role of theory in What Is To Be Done by articulating the principle that “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.”
The two conditions Marx notes below as essential to creating the conditions for abolishing private property now exist and are powerfully transforming the world. From Karl Marx. The German Ideology, Preface, Private Property and Communism:
“This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
References (in addition to those sited in this report)
Arquilla, Ronfeldt. “Cyber War is Coming” 1993
Arquilla, Ronfeldt. The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico. 1998
Pisani. “The Best Story, not the Biggest Bomb”. 2001
Johnathan Schell. “How America Changed the Meaning of War”. 2003
Alberts, Hayes. Power To The Edge – Command and Control in the Information Age. 2005
Gomez del Prado. “The Privatization of War: Mercenaries, Private Military and Security Companies (PMSC)”. 2010
Nick Turse. “The Special Ops Surge – America’s Secret War in 134 Countries”. 2014
Sean McFate. The Modern Mercenary – Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order. 2014
Amy Zalman. “Fighting Terrorists? Needed: More Effective Battle of Ideas”. 2016
Tom Engelhardt. Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. 2016
William Robinson. Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity. 2015
