Lenin and Bukharin on imperialism
Imperialism since Lenin and Bukharin
But does Lenin and Bukharin’s approach help us to understand the modern world? After World War II, the structure of global politics changed dramatically. Before the war, the world was economically and politically multipolar. After the war it remained economically multipolar but became politically bipolar, with the formation of two rival global military alliances, one dominated by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. While nominally socialist, the USSR was by this time ruled by a bureaucratic elite that exploited the majority of the population in order to compete with the West for power and influence. The stage was set for the Cold War. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union took over most of Eastern Europe (initially with the agreement of their wartime Western allies) and installed regimes modeled on its own, with one-party states that controlled in each case most of the economy. While state and capital never fully merged in most of the capitalist world, they did so in the Soviet bloc for several decades.11
But does Lenin and Bukharin’s approach help us to understand the modern world? After World War II, the structure of global politics changed dramatically. Before the war, the world was economically and politically multipolar. After the war it remained economically multipolar but became politically bipolar, with the formation of two rival global military alliances, one dominated by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. While nominally socialist, the USSR was by this time ruled by a bureaucratic elite that exploited the majority of the population in order to compete with the West for power and influence. The stage was set for the Cold War. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union took over most of Eastern Europe (initially with the agreement of their wartime Western allies) and installed regimes modeled on its own, with one-party states that controlled in each case most of the economy. While state and capital never fully merged in most of the capitalist world, they did so in the Soviet bloc for several decades.11
It would be hard to deny that this was a period of intense interimperialist rivalry. Wars continued on the periphery resulting in millions of deaths, and the two superpowers engaged in a massive arms race, but there was no war between the USA and the USSR, although they came extremely close at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and on several other occasions.12 But with the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, the structure of the global system changed again.
The end of the Cold War took place at the same time as the decisive US victory in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, and was supposed to usher in a “new world order” of international stability, in which military conflict would decline, and we would all receive the benefits of a massive “peace dividend.” But despite a mood of triumphalism among US imperial strategists and propagandists in the early 1990s, the peace dividend never materialized because the US ruling class found itself almost immediately faced with new challenges.
For the United States, one positive consequence of the Cold War was that it gave Washington political dominance over the major capitalist countries in Europe and Asia, since they depended on the US military for their security. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Western Europe’s military dependency on the US decreased at the same time as its economic and political integration accelerated. US planners viewed this as a potential medium-term threat to continued American global dominance. In the mid-1990s, some European countries began floating the idea of a European Defense Force that could act independently of the US-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which had been formed to oppose the USSR and now seemed to have little reason for its existence. US policy makers were also concerned about the possibility of a German-Russian strategic alliance, as well as the emergence of China as a major economic and military power that might begin to replace the US as the dominant power in Asia.
The Clinton administration responded to these challenges both economically and militarily. It pushed through policies of economic globalization designed to bind the other major powers into relations of dependency on the US in the World Trade Organization. Simultaneously it followed a policy of strengthening and expanding NATO in order to maintain the US presence in Europe and weaken Russia. This culminated with military interventions in the former Yugoslavia, intended to maintain European dependence on US armed power.
In the 1990s, US strategists from both sides of the political aisle began to look for ways in which Washington could use its enormous military power to keep its main rivals in check. On the right, the most influential group was a neoconservative think-tank named the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), several of whose members became prominent figures in the George W. Bush administration. In a report issued in September 2000, PNAC outlines the key strategic goal of “maintaining global US pre-eminence . . . and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” Key to achieving this goal, according to the report, was seizing control of the Persian Gulf region. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”13 Regime change in Iraq would, it was assumed, not only give the United States control over the second largest oil reserves in the world but also significant leverage over its main rivals, particularly Europe and China, both highly dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
This was not just the fantasy of neoconservative extremists. By the end of the 1990s, there was bipartisan consensus that Saddam’s government needed to be removed, and it had become official US policy. Shortly after the PNAC report of September 2000, the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies issued a report on the geopolitics of energy that pointed to a “fundamental contradiction” between the need to modernize Iraq’s oil infrastructure in order to increase production to meet growing world energy demand and continued sanctions.14 But if the sanctions were lifted while the Iraqi regime remained in power, then the chief beneficiaries would be France and Russia, which had negotiated major oil concessions with Saddam.
Underlying this immediate concern were continuing imperial rivalries with other major powers, driven by the same intersecting logics of economic and military competition analyzed by Lenin and Bukharin in different geopolitical circumstances ninety years earlier. None of the other powers could threaten Washington’s hegemony on a global level, but they could erode US dominance in specific areas. The long-term goal of US imperialism was to maintain its control of Middle East oil—first established after World War II—by shoring up friendly governments in the area no matter what their records might be on human rights, and by containing and when possible replacing unfriendly ones. It was in fact the Democrat Jimmy Carter who articulated this most clearly in his January 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”15 The so-called “Carter Doctrine” is a reminder that control over what a 1945 State Department memorandum to President Harry Truman had described as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history,”16 was always a bipartisan project.
When the Bush administration came to office in 2001, however, the goal of regime change in Iraq was not immediately achievable, since there was insufficient domestic support for an outright invasion. The PNAC report had bluntly noted in the previous year that what was needed to implement such a policy was “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”17 The attacks of 9/11 thus provided the Bush administration with exactly the opportunity it needed to pursue an agenda that it had already decided on. As Gilbert Achcar puts it: “September 11, 2001 came as a terrific windfall for the Bush administration. . . . The spectacular blow struck by Islamic fundamentalists, former US allies who had become its sworn enemies, created such a huge political trauma in the United States that the Bush administration thought it was possible at last, for the first time, to break once and for all with the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ and return to the unbridled military interventionism of the first Cold War decades.”18
The important point to note is that while there were tactical differences between the administration and some other sections of the political establishment about how best to pursue the agenda, there was near unanimity on the goal itself. The shift to a much more aggressive and unilateralist foreign policy was not the result of a neoconservative coup but a consequence of radically new circumstances providing US imperialism with the opportunity to solve its problems in a new way.
Some in the Bush administration wanted to attack Iraq immediately, but for political reasons it was decided that an invasion of Afghanistan was politically more feasible and could be a stepping stone towards the goal of removing Saddam Hussein. It had the additional benefit of allowing Washington to set up a string of military bases in Central Asia, thus increasing its control over Caspian oil and gas, and giving it greater leverage against both Russia and China.
Once the operation in Afghanistan seemed to have been completed, the Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq, with support from nearly all the leading figures in the Democratic Party. The conflicts with France, Germany, Russia, and China in the buildup to the invasion revealed the key rivalries between the major powers that were at the root of US policy. The war on Iraq was supposed to assert US dominance not just over the Middle East but over these economic and military rivals too. The goal was to remove a regime hostile to US interests, to gain control over Iraqi oil, thereby increasing US leverage over Europe and China, and to use Iraq as a base to reshape the entire Middle East along lines congenial to Washington.
In an interview on BBC television, General Jay Garner, former head of the Iraq occupation authority, described Washington’s long-term vision of Iraq as a political and military base, modeled on America’s control of the Pacific in the early twentieth century.
We used the Philippines. And the Philippines, for the lack of a better term, it was in essence a coaling station for the navy. And it allowed the US navy to maintain presence in the Pacific. They maintained great presence in the Pacific.I think . . . we should look right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the Middle East, where we have some presence there and it gives a settling effect there, and it also gives us a strategic advantage there, and I think we ought to just accept that and take that for a period of time, as long as the Iraqi people are willing to allow us to be guests in their country.19
This interview reveals some of the continuities of current policy with the long history of US imperialism. But the world that US policy has brought about over the past few decades has created new problems for US imperialism. The occupation of Iraq first bogged down the US militarily while at the same time removing Iran’s biggest rival in the region, leading in turn to an intensification of Washington’s confrontation with Tehran.
Even more importantly, while Washington has been largely successful in reintegrating the countries of Western Europe into a US-dominated international framework since the end of the Cold War, the same is not true for Russia (which is still a major military power, with thousands of nuclear missiles) or China (which is a rising economic and military power). Indeed US policy makers are obsessed by the rise of China and how they can prevent it from becoming a major challenger to US power on a regional or even a global level. The US used 9/11 to set up military bases in central Asia. In response, Russia and China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in an effort to maneuver the United States out of the region. They were successful in pushing it out of Uzbekistan, with Russia and China supporting the Uzbek regime. That is an illustration of a process unfolding on a much larger scale in which the major centers of economic and military power in the world continue to maneuver against each other for advantage. None of them are prepared to stand out against the United States directly because the costs are too high, but the process illustrates the fragmentation and instability of the global system.
The shift to a much more aggressive and unilateralist foreign policy by the Bush administration following 9/11 was not the result of neoconservatives hijacking the government,20 but a consequence of radically new circumstances providing US imperialism with the opportunity to solve its problems in a new way. For that reason, little changed when Barack Obama replaced Bush as president, as the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat pointed out in 2011:
For those with eyes to see, the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office. But last week made it official: When the story of America’s post-9/11 wars is written, historians will be obliged to assess the two administrations together, and pass judgment on the Bush-Obama era.21
This is not exactly what most of Obama’s supporters had in mind when they voted for him in 2008, but two-and-a-half years later, the record speaks for itself. Troops were eventually withdrawn from Iraq in accordance with a plan begun under Bush, but the war in Afghanistan was expanded, with regular attacks across the border into neighboring Pakistan and high numbers of civilian deaths, a secret bombing campaign in Yemen exposed by Wikileaks, an open bombing campaign against Libya, and saber rattling against Iran. Obama also announced a “pivot to Asia” to challenge China’s growing power and greatly increased the US military presence in Africa. US imperialism did not end when George Bush left office.
These developments confirmed Lenin’s observation that imperialism is not simply a policy, but something built into the fabric of developed capitalism, as economic competition gives rise to geopolitical competition and military intervention. The form of that competition can change over time, but so long as capitalism exists, so will imperialism. That is why—apart from minor differences—both major political parties in the United States pursue the same foreign policy agenda.
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