Trump: Isolationist in Instinct, Unpredictable in Action

Selective engagement will replace liberal internationalism.

By Walden Bello

November 21, 2024

Source: FPIP


There are a number of certainties about the coming Trump administration. One is that it will be bad for the climate. Another is that it will be bad for American democracy. A third is that it will be largely bad for minorities and for women.

But when it comes to many other matters, like foreign policy, the key word is unpredictability, for Trump, as the world learned during his first term in office, is unpredictability personified. Observing this caveat when it comes to what to expect in terms of concrete actions and policies, one can nevertheless discern what are likely to be the fundamental thrusts of Trump 2.0. This is as much the case in the area of foreign policy as in domestic policy.
Liberal Internationalism as “Grand Strategy”

To use a common phrase these days, the coming Trump presidency will not only be an “inflection point” for U.S. domestic politics but for U.S. foreign policy as well. This should not be surprising since it is domestic priorities and domestic public opinion that, in the last instance, determine a country’s stance towards the outside world—what is called its “grand strategy.” The last time the United States experienced the kind of transformative event in foreign affairs that is coming on January 20, 2025, is 83 years ago when President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought the United States into World War II. FDR had a hell of a time overcoming isolationist sentiment and may well have failed had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor and changed public sentiment overnight from isolationism toward global engagement.

The grand strategy that Roosevelt inaugurated can best be called “liberal internationalism.” Following the end of World War II and the beginning of the competition with the Soviet Union, that strategy was consolidated as “containment liberalism” by President Harry Truman, and it has been the guiding approach of every administration ever since, with the exception of the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. The fundamental premise of liberal internationalism was best expressed by President John F Kennedy in his inaugural speech in 1961, when he said that Americans “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Another much quoted characterization of this outlook was provided by another Democratic Party personality, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, when she said that for the maintenance of global order, the United States was “the indispensable country.”

Liberal internationalism had its hard and not-so-hard versions, the former often termed containment liberalism or neoconservatism. But whatever their differences when it came to rhetoric or implementation, the differences between liberal internationalism and neoconservatism were matters of nuance, not substance. The rhetoric was lofty but the subtext of the rhetoric of liberal internationalism was making the world safe for the expansion of America capital by extending the political and military reach of the U.S. state.
The Unraveling of Liberal Internationalism

The grand strategy of liberal internationalism, however, became mired in its own ambitions, its first major setback occurring in Southeast Asia, with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Toward the end of the twentieth century, globalization, the economic component of liberal internationalism, led to the unmooring of U.S. capital from its geographical location in the United States as American transnationals went out in search of cheap labor, resulting in the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and the building up of a rival economic power, China. Power projection, the military prong of the project, led to overextension or overreach, with the ambitious effort of President George W. Bush to remake the world in America’s image by carrying out the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq during Washington’s so-called “unipolar moment” in the early 2000s. The result was a debacle from which the United States has never recovered. Both the crisis of globalization and the crisis of overextension paved the way for the rebirth of the isolationist impulse that broke to the surface under Trump’s presidency in 2017-2021.

Only in retrospect can one appreciate how radically the isolationist, anti-globalist, and protectionist foreign policy of the first Trump administration broke with liberal internationalism. Trump, among other things, tore up the neoliberal Trans-Pacific Partnership that both Democrats and Republicans championed, considered NATO commitments a burden, demanded that Japan and Korea pay more for keeping U.S. troops and bases in their countries, trampled on the rules of the World Trade Organization, ignored the IMF and World Bank, negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, and broke the West’s united front against North Korea by stepping across the DMZ to pat Kim Jong Un on the back on June 30, 2019. Some have said that his foreign policy was erratic or chaotic, but there was an underlying logic to his supposed madness, and this was his felt need to play opportunistically to an important part of his white, working-class and middle-class base that felt they had had enough of bearing the burdens of empire for the sake of the American political and economic elites.

But like Roosevelt in his efforts to break with isolationism in the early 1940s, Trump’s drive to break with liberal internationalism was plagued with obstacles, foremost of which were some of his appointees, who were open or covert adherents of liberal internationalism and proponents of globalization, and the entrenched national security bureaucracy known as the “deep state.” With Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 elections, these elements of the old foreign policy regime bounced back with a vengeance during the Biden administration, which proceeded to give full backing to Ukraine in its fight with Russia, expand the remit of NATO to the Pacific, and plunge the United States into full-scale military containment of China.

For Trump, there is a second chance to remake U.S. foreign policy beginning on January 20, 2025, and it’s unlikely he’ll allow partisans of the old regime spoil his efforts a second time. In this regard, one must not be fooled by the pro-expansionist or interventionist rhetoric or record of some of his cabinet picks, like Marco Rubio. These folks have no fixed political compass but political self-interest, and they will adjust to Trump’s instincts, outlook, and agenda.
Orban on Trump’s Grand Strategy

Probably the world leader that Trump admires most is Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban. Indeed, Trump and Orban form a mutual admiration society. Prior to the elections, Orban was channeling Trump to the world. On the question of America’s relations with the world under a second Trump presidency, Orban had this to say:


[M]any people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. ..And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: “America First, everything here, everything will come home!”… For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

Let’s parse and expand on Orban’s comments. For Trump, there is one overriding agenda, and that is to rejuvenate, repair, and reconstitute what he regards as an economy and society that has been in sharp decline owing to policies of the last few decades, policies that were broadly shared by Democrats and traditional Republicans.

For him, neoliberal policies, by encouraging American capital to go abroad, particularly to China, and free-trade policies, have greatly harmed the U.S. industrial infrastructure, resulting in loss of good paying blue-collar jobs, stagnation in wages, and rising inequality. “Making American Great Again” or MAGA is mainly an inward-looking perspective that prioritizes economic rejuvenation by bringing American capital back, walling off the American economic from cheap imports, particularly from China, and reducing immigration to a trickle—with that trickle coming mainly from what he would term “non-shithole countries” like Norway. Racism, dog-whistle politics, and anti-migrant sentiment are, not surprisingly, woven into Trump’s domestic and foreign policy rhetoric since his base is principally—though not exclusively—the white working class.

Foreign policy is, from this perspective, a distraction that must be seen as a necessary evil. The MAGA mindset, which is basically isolationism cum nationalism, sees U.S. security arrangements abroad, whether in the guise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or mutual defense treaties such as those with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as obsolete commitments that may have been appropriate at a time that the United States was an expansionist power with tremendous resources but have since become bothersome relics for a power in decline, gaping holes that leak both money, manpower, and energy that would be better deployed elsewhere.

Trump is not interested in expanding a liberal empire via free trade and the free flow of capital—an order defended by the political canopy of multilateralism and promoted via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy. What he is interested in is building a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world, where the multilateral institutions through which the United States has exercised its economic power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be much less relevant as instruments of U.S. power. Deal-making, like the one Trump conducted with Kim Jong-Un during his first term, would, instead, be one of the main methods of defending American interests. Unilateral military and economic actions against those outside the fortress that are seen as threats, rather than allied endeavors, will be the order of the day.
Selective Engagement and Spheres of Influence

Rather than isolationism, probably a better term for Trump’s grand strategy is “selective engagement,” to contrast it with the open-ended global engagement of liberal internationalism.

One aspect of selective engagement will be disengagement from what Trump denigrates as “shithole countries,” meaning, most of us in the global South, in terms of trying to shape their political and economic regimes via the IMF and the World Bank and providing bilateral economic and military aid. Definitely, there will be no more talk of “exporting freedom and democracy” that was a staple of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Another aspect of selective engagement will be a “spheres of influence” approach. North America and South America will be regarded as being Washington’s natural sphere of influence. So, Trump will stick to the Monroe Doctrine, and maybe his choice of Marco Rubio to be secretary of state might reflect this, since Rubio, a child of Cuban refugees, has been very hostile to left-leaning governments in Latin America.

Eastern Europe will likely be seen as belonging to Moscow’s sphere of influence, with Trump reversing the post-Cold War U.S. policy of extending NATO eastward, which was a key factor that triggered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The European Union will be left to fend for itself, with Trump unlikely to invest any effort to prop up NATO, much less expand its remit to the Asia Pacific, as Biden has done. It would be a mistake to underestimate Trump’s resentment of the western allies of the United States, which, in his view, have prospered at the expense of America.

The downgrading of the United States as a central player in the Middle East will continue, with Washington’s confining itself to providing weapons for Israel and encouraging a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and the reactionary Arab states like Saudi Arabia to stabilize the area against Iran and the wave of radical Islamism that direct U.S. intervention failed to contain. Needless to say, Trump will gladly turn a blind eye to Tel Aviv’s carrying out its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.

Finally, in the Asia Pacific, there is a strong likelihood that while Trump will pursue the trade and technology war with China that he initiated during his first term, he will dial down the military confrontation with Beijing, mindful that his base is not going to like military adventures that take away the focus from building Fortress America. Concretely, he’ll raise the price for keeping U.S. troops and bases in Japan and South Korea. He’ll reengage Kim Jong Un in the dialogue he was carrying out when he crossed the DMZ in 2019—a dialogue that could have unpredictable consequences for the U.S. military presence in South Korea and Japan. He already gave an indication of this during his acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention when he said he had to initiate a dialogue with Kim owing to the fact that he “is someone with a lot of nuclear weapons.” Could the withdrawal or radical reduction of Washington’s military umbrella for South Korea and Japan be the price of a grand deal between Kim and Trump? This is the specter that haunts both states.

Trump is likely to cease sending ships through the Taiwan Straits to provoke China, as Biden did, and one can expect him to tell Taiwan that there’s a dollar price to be paid for being defended by the United States and that Taipei should not expect the same assurance that Biden gave it that Washington will come to Taiwan’s rescue in the event of a Chinese invasion. I think Trump knows that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan was never in the cards anyway and that Beijing’s strategy was always cross-straits economic integration as the means to eventually absorb Taiwan.

As for the Philippines and the South China Sea, a Trump administration is likely to tell Manila that there will be none of that “iron clad” guarantee promised by Biden of an automatic U.S. military response under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty in support of Manila in the event of a major confrontation with China in the South China Sea, like the sinking of the Philippine vessel. Trump, it must be remembered, has gone on record saying that he would not waste one American life for what he called “rocks” in the South China Sea. The Pentagon’s push to build up the Philippines as a forward base for the military confrontation with China that Biden fully supported is likely to be reviewed, if not put on hold or abandoned.

In short, Trump is likely to communicate to Xi Jinping that the Asia Pacific is China’s sphere of influence, though this message will be delivered informally and covered up by rhetoric of continued American engagement with the region.

In conclusion, one must restate the caveat made at the beginning of this piece: that there are few certainties when it comes to an unpredictable figure like Trump. These few certainties are that Trump will be bad for the climate, for American democracy, for women, and for minorities. As for the rest, one can speculate based on past behavior, statements, and events, but one would be wise to always remind oneself that while his instincts are isolationist, unpredictability in policy and action has been and will continue to be the hallmark of Donald Trump.

Walden Bello is currently the International Adjunct Professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Co-Chairperson of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2019), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/Zed, 2019), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009) and Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013).

 

The logic of imperialism’s ‘Maritime Great Game’ in the Southeast Asian Sea

By Rasti Delizo

Published 21 November, 2024

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First published at Amandla!.

The states with a coastline adjoining the Southeast Asian Sea are all facing a sharply rising regional quagmire. They are witnessing a soaring economic-diplomatic-security confrontation between the world’s top two imperialist powers. The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China are destabilising Southeast Asia by forcefully projecting their respective geostrategic objectives throughout the area. And by doing so, the region’s social majority — its working-class masses — are now becoming dangerously embroiled in this escalating great power collision.

A strategic competition

This imperialist rivalry is defined by the intensifying strategic competition between the US and China. They are both aiming to secure increased regional hegemony. So, they have unleashed parallel initiatives to thwart each other’s sweeping geopolitical designs for the immense Afro-Eurasia-Indo-Pacific as a whole — the Eastern Hemisphere.

In fact, these imperialist states are in relative decline. Only through international rivalry can they negate their weakened domestic conditions. Their reactions aim to protect their bourgeois socioeconomic formations from the fallouts of the chronically ruptured global capitalist system of production.

What is SEAS?

The Southeast Asian Sea is the vast expanse of salt water that lies within the southeastern region of Asia. Given its location, using the name ‘Southeast Asian Sea’, or ‘SEAS’, is more precise than the traditional name, the ‘South China Sea’. Another reason to use the name is to counter lingering inter-state frictions, which are encouraged by the use of nationalist-oriented place names for this marine realm. This readily breeds the reactionary phenomenon of national chauvinism and its destructive behaviours.

The Southeast Asian Sea remains one of planet Earth’s most diverse biospheres. It is a colossal aquatic ecosystem, covering approximately three and a half million square kilometres. It has over two hundred coral islets, an abundance of hydrocarbon deposits, and huge amounts of marine life. This organic wealth of natural resources is enough to sustain these states’ economies.

The Southeast Asian Sea is also a historically strategic marine domain that connects the Indian and Pacific oceans. As the region’s preeminent maritime corridor, its natural sea lanes provide crucial passage daily to enormous volumes of the world’s seaborne trade. It has key chokepoints in the straits of Malacca, Sunda and Lombok, and therefore acts as a vital channel for the trade between the economies of Europe, Africa and West Asia, and those of East Asia. And as a strategic sea spanning a zone of the Eastern Hemisphere, there is also a massive amount of shipping trade originating from the Western Hemisphere (i.e., North/Central/South America and the Caribbean).

Maritime Southeast Asia has consequently become a focus area for the competing interests of the world’s imperialist powers. Its regional security environment is now a turbulent arena of contestation for the major powers. They essentially seek to carve out additional space for capital accumulation through military means. This has turned the SEAS into an acute, perilous, global flashpoint.

A struggle between two imperialisms

The imperialist competition between the US and China is a particular manifestation of a generalised systemic crisis materially rooted in the inherent contradictions of the prevailing imperialist world system. Southeast Asia is being impacted by a strategic shift underpinning the bourgeois international order.

This great power engagement is unlike the last century’s Cold War. It is clearly not an international struggle between opposing ideological poles, supporting the strategic visions of contending socioeconomic systems. The first Cold War (1946-1991) was a clash of starkly counterposed systems — the capitalist camp (led by American imperialism) versus the communist camp (led by the former Soviet Union).

In contrast, the contemporary inter-imperialist conflict is being waged through a singular ‘capitalist unipolar order’. The contesting imperialist powers belong to the same capitalist pole. Together, they principally direct the monopoly capitalist agenda of the global core — albeit in an adversarial way.

Neither of them challenges the fundamentals of the capitalist system of production and distribution. Neither of them opposes globalised finance-monopoly capitalism’s exploitative norms of extracting surplus value through unequal exchange mechanisms to guarantee incessant capital accumulation for the imperialist core. Nor do they even attempt, in any serious way, to break imperialism’s circuits of global capital that oppressively control the periphery. Both American and Chinese imperialisms openly support the capitalist logic of guaranteeing the net flow of value (wealth) from the dominated countries to the centres of world capital.

Imperialist competition is mainly driven by the slow global pace of capitalist development due to stagnant growth with falling rates of profit. These negatives are made worse by other disruptive factors of the capitalist world economy, especially its generalised crisis of overproduction, along with overaccumulation, chronic underutilisation of capacity linked to constant mass unemployment, and global conditions of uneven and combined development. Thus, the central dynamics fueling this neo-Cold War moment stem from the contradictions intrinsic to the imperialist world system itself.

This system principally functions through the logic of super profits based on the eternal accumulation of capital. Its structure is built on exploitative and oppressive systems based on a global core-periphery model. In plain terms, this comprehensive socioeconomic formation supports and reinforces the capitalist, unipolar order.

The imperialist struggle for domination

Inside the global core lies a very small group of advanced capitalist economies. They are arranged into contending blocs led by the leading imperialist powers. These imperialist blocs directly compete with each other for economic control and political dominance over most of the world’s dependent semi-colonial states, which lie at the periphery. The power struggle between the US and China represents the current phase of the international system.

The imperialist blocs continually seek to increase the scope of their power through constantly expanding their respective spheres of influence and domination. In advancing their schemes for predominance, the imperialists try to reshape the international division of labour to favour their own geostrategic goals and interests. As a result, worldwide disputes, strife and wars inevitably erupt between them as they fight for global ascendancy.

These imperialist powers are always prepared to wage relentless acts of aggression beyond their frontiers. They do so to achieve a competitive advantage for their ruling classes. They engage in harmful and destructive economic competition, political schemes, and aggressive wars worldwide, regardless of the social cost. This is a general characteristic of monopoly capital. And during crisis moments, the imperialist states readily strike at each other in attempts to attain economic-political-security superiority for their own financial-oligarchic national regimes.

Unquestionably, the world suffers from the consequences of global polycrisis, which results from this in terms of the economy, politics, security, health, and climate emergency.

Following the ‘global capitalist crisis-depression’ that flared in September 2008, the US worked to regain and stabilise its international strategic position. It pursued this by strengthening its regional spheres of influence via attempts at reshaping the global economic and political order to align with its interests.

US strategy

US imperialism’s main goal remains the rejuvenation of American capital, chiefly through a revitalised global network of ever-expanding national markets in pivotal regions of the world. Combined with this, US imperialism robustly restimulates and weaponises monopoly capitalism for higher growth. It does so by producing enormous amounts of war materiel and using it in wars overseas. After the conflicts end, American capital then rebuilds the devastated countries. Through this coercive cycle, Washington aims to continually reshape the capitalist world order to maintain its global dominance. 

In functional terms, American imperialism currently advances a redesigned, long-range, foreign-security policy framework. Driven by the Biden regime’s central mantra, “We are in a competition with China to win the 21st Century”, the US’s geostrategy is based on building strong regional economic and military alliances to counter China in the Asia-Indo-Pacific region. Guided by its dual 2022 geostrategic blueprints — the ‘National Security Strategy’ and the ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’ — Washington’s main goal is to secure ‘free and open’ access to the region’s air and maritime arenas while limiting China’s opportunities for expansion.

By now, US imperialism has effectively extended the ambit of NATO into the Asia-Indo-Pacific. In also promoting market access initiatives, the ‘globalised NATO’ project aligns American monopoly capital’s economic and military priorities. To implement this strategy, Washington integrates the neoliberal Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), along with alliances like the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS), Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), and the Japan-Philippines-US political-military partnerships. Together, these coordinated efforts jointly form American imperialism’s battering ram to oppose Chinese imperialism in the region.

China’s strategy

To foil this, China has built up its own network. These include the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Maritime Silk Road (MSR), the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the BRICS (Brazil/Russia/India/China/South Africa) grouping.

China’s comprehensive national power is not just a counterbalance to that of the US; it is also aimed at maintaining the global bourgeois system along imperialist lines.

Despite this, the US is succeeding in enticing other East Asian states to join its imperialist project to deny/degrade/damage the Chinese imperialist bloc’s regional strategic agenda. Integral to this, Washington regularly affirms its diplomatic narrative of “upholding the rules-based international order” (a code phrase for globally propping up US imperialist interests). So, it enlists blatantly pro-American states — like the Philippines — to openly provoke China. This is exemplified by the deployment of American troops and weaponry inside US-controlled military bases on Philippine territory.

The Philippines as a puppet in the struggle

Washington has a clear strategic plan, but Manila’s foreign policy planners fail to consider how China’s leadership thinks. Filipino leaders assume China will see their actions as harmless, even when the Philippines cooperates with the US. However, what really matters is how China (as a great power) views its external security environment — not what Manila claims. This allows Washington to strongly take advantage of Manila’s blind loyalty to the US to provoke China.

China’s social-chauvinist militarism in the Southeast Asian Sea should be condemned. Equally, the international communist movement must also denounce the joint US-Philippines military manoeuvres. Clearly, all imperialist wars of aggression must be opposed.

At present, US imperialism is already preparing for a possible limited war with China, using the Philippines as a trigger point to reshape Southeast Asia’s geopolitical landscape. Washington aims to strengthen its influence in the region to boost American economic growth and power. This will lead to a risky and significant shift in the ongoing imperialist competition within the area. And so, today, this is now Southeast Asia’s ‘Maritime Great Game’.

Rasti Delizo is a global affairs analyst. He is a member of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP/Solidarity of Filipino Workers); BMP is a revolutionary socialist political centre of the Filipino working-class movement.

 

Geopolitical conflicts, anti-imperialism and internationalism in times of ‘reactionary acceleration’

By Jaime Pastor

Published 21 November, 2024

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First published in Spanish at Viento Sur. Translation from Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.

Within the general framework of the multidimensional crisis in which we find ourselves, now aggravated by the stimulus that Trump’s recent electoral victory represents for the rise of an extreme right on a global scale, it seems even more evident that we are witnessing a profound crisis of the international geopolitical (dis)order, as well as of the basic rules of International Law that have been established since the end of the Second World War. The most tragic manifestation of this crisis (which calls into question even the future of the UN) is found in the genocidal war against Gaza (Awad, 2024), to which are currently added around 56 wars across the planet.

In this context, the imperialist hierarchical system based on US hegemony is openly questioned and challenged by other major powers, such as China and Russia, as well as by others on a regional scale, such as Iran. This global geopolitical competition is clearly evident in certain war conflicts, the evolution of which will determine a new configuration of the balance of power within this system, as well as of the blocks present or in formation, such as the BRICS. In light of this new scenario, in this article I will focus on a summary description of the current panorama, then characterise the different positions that appear within the left in this new phase and insist on the need to build an internationalist left that is opposed to all imperialisms (main or secondary) and in solidarity with the struggles of the attacked peoples.

Polycrisis and authoritarian neoliberalisms

There is broad consensus on the left regarding the diagnosis we can make of the global crisis that the world is currently going through, with the eco-social and climate crisis as a backdrop. A polycrisis that we can define with Pierre Rousset as “multifaceted, the result of the combination of multiple specific crises. So we are not facing a simple sum of crises, but their interaction, which multiplies their dynamics, fueling a death spiral for the human species (and for a large part of living species)” (Pastor, 2024).

A situation that is closely related to the exhaustion of the neoliberal capitalist accumulation regime that began in the mid-1970s, which, after the fall of the bloc dominated by the USSR, took a leap forward towards its expansion on a global scale. A process that led to the Great Recession that began in 2008 (aggravated by austerity policies, the consequences of the pandemic crisis and the war in Ukraine), which ended up frustrating the expectations of social advancement and political stability that the promised happy globalization had generated, mainly among significant sectors of the new middle classes.

A globalization, it must be remembered, that was expanded under the new neoliberal cycle that throughout its different phases: combative, normative and punitive (Davies, 2016), has been building a new transnational economic constitutionalism at the service of global corporate tyranny and the destruction of the structural, associative and social power of the working class. And, what is more serious, it has turned into common sense the “ market civilization” as the only possible one, although this whole process has acquired different variants and forms of political regimes, generally based on strong States immune to democratic pressure (Gill, 2022; Slobodian, 2021). A neoliberalism that, however, is today showing its inability to offer a horizon of improvement for the majority of humanity on an increasingly inhospitable planet.

We are therefore in a period, both at the state and interstate level, full of uncertainties, under a financialized, digital, extractivist and rentier capitalism that makes our lives precarious and seeks at all costs to lay the foundations for a new stage of growth with an increasingly active role of the States at its service. To do so, it resorts to new forms of political domination functional to this project that, increasingly, tend to come into conflict not only with freedoms and rights won after long popular struggles, but also with liberal democracy. In this way, an increasingly authoritarian neoliberalism is spreading, not only in the South but increasingly in the North, with the threat of a “reactionary acceleration” (Castellani, 2024). A process now stimulated by a Trumpism that is becoming the master discursive framework of a rising far right, willing to constitute itself as an alternative to the crisis of global governance and the decomposition of the old political elites (Urbán, 2024; Camargo, 2024).

The imperialist hierarchical system in dispute

Within this context, succinctly explained here, we are witnessing a crisis of the imperialist hierarchical system that has predominated since the fall of the Soviet bloc, facilitated precisely by the effects generated by a process of globalization that has led to the displacement of the center of gravity of the world economy from the North Atlantic (Europe-USA) to the Pacific (USA, East and Southeast Asia).

Indeed, following the Great Recession that began in 2007-2008 and the subsequent crisis of neoliberal globalization, a new phase has begun in which a reconfiguration of the global geopolitical order is taking place, tending to be multipolar but at the same time asymmetrical, in which the United States remains the great hegemonic power (monetary, military and geopolitical), but is weakened and challenged by China, the great rising power, and Russia, as well as by other sub-imperial or secondary powers in different regions of the planet. Meanwhile, in many countries of the South, faced with the plundering of their resources, the increase in sovereign debt and popular revolts and wars of different kinds, the end of development as a goal to be achieved is giving way to reactionary populisms in the name of order and security.

Thus, global and regional geopolitical competition is being accentuated by the different competing interests, not only on the economic and technological level, but also on the military and values level, with the consequent rise of state ethno-nationalisms against presumed internal and external enemies.

However, one must not forget the high degree of economic, energy and technological interdependence that has been developing across the planet in the context of neoliberal globalisation, as was clearly highlighted both during the global pandemic crisis and the lack of an effective energy blockade against Russia despite the agreed sanctions. Added to this are two new fundamental factors: on the one hand, the current possession of nuclear weapons by major powers (there are currently four nuclear hotspots: one in the Middle East (Israel) and three in Eurasia (Ukraine, India-Pakistan and the Korean peninsula); and, on the other, the climate, energy and materials crisis (we are in overtime!), which substantially differentiate this situation from that before 1914. These factors condition the geopolitical and economic transition underway, setting limits to a deglobalisation that is probably partial and which, of course, does not promise to be happy for the great majority of humanity. At the same time, these factors also warn of the increased risk of escalation in armed conflicts in which powers with nuclear weapons are directly or indirectly involved, as is the case in Ukraine or Palestine.

This specificity of the current historical stage leads us, according to Promise Li, to consider that the relationship between the main great powers (especially if we refer to that between the USA and China) is given through an unstable balance between an “antagonistic cooperation” and a growing “inter-imperialist rivalry”. A balance that could be broken in favour of the latter, but that could also be normalised within the common search for a way out of the secular stagnation of a global capitalism in which China (Rousset, 2021) and Russia (Serfati, 2022) have now been inserted, although with very different evolutions. A process, therefore, full of contradictions, which is extensible to other powers, such as India, which are part of the BRICS, in which the governments of its member countries have not so far questioned the central role of organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, which remain under US hegemony (Fuentes, 2023; Toussaint, 2024).

However, it is clear that the geopolitical weakening of the United States — especially after its total fiasco in Iraq and Afghanistan and, now, the crisis of legitimacy that is being caused by its unconditional support for the genocidal State of Israel — is allowing a greater potential margin of manoeuvre on the part of different global or regional powers, in particular those with nuclear weapons. For this reason I agree with Pierre Rousset’s description:

The relative decline of the United States and the incomplete rise of China have opened up a space in which secondary powers can play a significant role, at least in their own region (Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, etc.), although the limits of the BRICS are clear. In this situation, Russia has not failed to present China with a series of faits accomplis on Europe’s eastern borders. Acting in concert, Moscow and Beijing were largely the masters of the game on the Eurasian continent. However, there was no coordination between the invasion of Ukraine and an actual attack on Taiwan (Pastor, 2024).

This, undoubtedly facilitated by the greater or lesser weight of other factors related to the polycrisis, explains the outbreak of conflicts and wars in very different parts of the planet, but in particular those that occur in three very relevant current epicentres: Ukraine, Palestine and, although for now in terms of the cold war, Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, we have seen how the US took advantage of Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to relaunch the expansion of a NATO in crisis towards other countries in Eastern and Northern Europe. An objective closely associated with the reformulation of NATO’s “new strategic concept”, as we were able to see at the summit that this organisation held in Madrid in July 2022 (Pastor, 2022) and more recently at the one held in Washington in July of this year. At the latter, this strategy was reaffirmed, as well as the consideration of China as the main strategic competitor, while any criticism of the State of Israel was avoided. The latter is what is showing the double standards (Achcar, 2024) of the Western bloc with regard to its involvement in the war in Ukraine, on the one hand, and its complicity with the genocide that the colonial State of Israel is committing against the Palestinian people, on the other.

Again, we have also seen NATO’s growing interest in the Southern flank in order to pursue its racist necropolitics against illegal immigration while continuing to aspire to compete for control of basic resources in countries of the South, especially in Africa, where French and American imperialisms are losing weight against China and Russia.

In this way, the strategy of the Western bloc has been redefined, within which US hegemony has been strengthened on the military level (thanks, above all, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and to which a more divided European Union with its old German engine weakened is clearly subordinated. However, after Trump’s victory, the European Union seems determined to reinforce its military power in the name of the search for a false strategic autonomy, since it will continue to be linked to the framework of NATO. Meanwhile, many countries in the South are distancing themselves from this bloc, although with different interests among them, which differentiates the possible alliances that may be formed from the one that in the past characterized the Non-Aligned Movement.

In any case, it is likely that after his electoral victory, Donald Trump will make a significant shift in US foreign policy in order to implement his MAGA (Make America Great Again) project beyond the geoeconomic level (intensifying his competition with China and, although at a different level, with the EU), especially in relation to the three epicentres of conflicts mentioned above: with regard to Ukraine, by substantially reducing economic and military aid and seeking some form of agreement with Putin, at least on a ceasefire; with regard to Israel, by reinforcing his support for Netanyahu’s total war; and finally by reducing his military commitment to Taiwan.

What anti-imperialist internationalism from the left?

In this context of the rise of an authoritarian neoliberalism (in its different versions: the reactionary one of the extreme right and that of the extreme centre, mainly) and of various geopolitical conflicts, the great challenge for the left is how to reconstruct antagonistic social and political forces anchored in the working class and capable of forging an anti-imperialism and a solidarity internationalism that is not subordinated to one or another great power or regional capitalist bloc.

A task that will not be easy, because in the current phase we are witnessing deep divisions within the left in relation to the position to maintain in the face of some of the aforementioned conflicts. Trying to synthesize, with Ashley Smith (2024), we could distinguish four positions:

The first would be the one that aligns itself with the Western imperial bloc in the common defense of alleged democratic values against Russia, or with the State of Israel in its unjustifiable right to self-defense, as has been stated by a majority sector of the social-liberal left. A position that hides the true imperialist interests of that bloc, does not denounce its double standards and ignores the increasingly de-democratizing and racist drift that Western regimes are experiencing, as well as the colonial and occupying character of the Israeli State.

The second is what is often described as campism, which would align itself with states such as Russia or China, which it considers allies against US imperialism because it considers the latter to be the main enemy, ignoring the expansionist geopolitical interests of these two powers. A position that reminds us of the one that many communist parties held in the past during the Cold War in relation to the USSR, but which now becomes a caricature considering both the reactionary nature of Putin’s regime and the persistent state-bureaucratic despotism in China.

The third is that of a geopolitical reductionism , which is now reflected in the war in Ukraine, limiting itself to considering it to be only an inter-imperialist conflict. This attitude, adopted by a sector of pacifism and the left, implies denying the legitimacy of the dimension of national struggle against the occupying power that the Ukrainian resistance has, without ceasing to criticize the neoliberal and pro-Atlanticist character of the government that heads it.

Finally, there is the one that is against all imperialisms (whether major or minor) and against all double standards, showing itself ready to stand in solidarity with all attacked peoples, even if they may have the support of one or another imperial power (such as the US and the EU in relation to Ukraine) or regional power (such as Iran in relation to Hamas in Palestine). This is a position that does not accept respect for the spheres of influence that the various major powers aspire to protect or expand, and that stands in solidarity with the peoples who fight against foreign occupation and for the right to decide their future (in particular, with the leftist forces in these countries that are betting on an alternative to neoliberalism), and is not aligned with any political-military bloc.

This last position is the one that I consider to be the most coherent from an anti-capitalist left. In fact, keeping in mind the historical distance and recognizing the need to analyze the specificity of each case, it coincides with the criteria that Lenin tried to apply when analyzing the centrality that the struggle against national and colonial oppression was acquiring in the imperialist phase of the early twentieth century. This was reflected, in relation to conflicts that broke out then, in several of his articles such as, for example, in “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” written in January-February 1916, where he maintained that:

The fact that the struggle for national freedom against an imperialist power can be exploited, under certain conditions, by another ’great’ power to achieve equally imperialist ends cannot force social democracy to renounce recognizing the right of nations to self-determination, just as the repeated cases of the use of republican slogans by the bourgeoisie for the purposes of political fraud and financial plunder (for example, in Latin countries) cannot force social democrats to renounce their republicanism (Lenin, 1976).

An internationalist position that must be accompanied by mobilisation against the remilitarisation process underway by NATO and the EU, but also against that of other powers such as Russia or China. And which must commit to putting the fight for unilateral nuclear disarmament and the dissolution of military blocs back at the centre of the agenda, taking up the baton of the powerful peace movement that developed in Europe during the 1980s, with the feminist activists of Greenham Common and intellectuals such as Edward P. Thompson at the forefront. An orientation that must obviously be inserted within a global eco-socialist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial project.

References

Achcar, Gilbert (2024) “Anti-fascism and the Fall of Atlantic Liberalism”, Viento Sur, 19/08/24.

Awad, Nada (2024) “International Law and Israeli Exceptionalism”, Viento Sur, 193, pp. 19-27.

Camargo, Laura (2024) Discursive Trumpism . Madrid: Verbum (in press).

Castellani, Lorenzo (2024) “With Trump, the Age of Reactionary Acceleration”, Le Grand Continent, 11/08/24.

Davies, William (2016) “Neoliberalism 3.0”, New Left Review , 101, pp. 129-143.

Fuentes, Federico (2023) “Interview with Promise Li: US-China Rivalry, ’Antagonistic Cooperation’ and Anti-Imperialism”, Viento Sur, 191, 5-18. Available in English at https://links.org.au/us-china-rivalry-antagonistic-cooperation-and-anti-imperialism-21st-century-interview-promise-li

Gill, Stephen (2002) “Globalization, Market Civilization and Disciplinary Neoliberalism”. In Hovden, E. and Keene, E. (Eds.) The Globalization of Liberalism. London: Millennium. Palgrave Macmillan.

Lenin, Vladimir (1976) “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, Selected Works, Volume V, pp. 349-363. Moscow: Progreso.

Pastor, Jaime (2022) “NATO’s New Strategic Concept. Towards a New Permanent Global War?”, Viento Sur, 07/02/22. Available in English at https://links.org.au/towards-new-permanent-global-war-natos-new-strategic-concept

— (2024) “Interview with Pierre Rousset: World Crisis and Wars: What Internationalism for the 21st Century?”, Viento Sur, 04/16/24. Available in English at https://links.org.au/global-crisis-conflict-and-war-what-internationalism-21st-century

Rousset, Pierre (2021) “China, the New Emerging Imperialism”, Viento Sur, 10/16/21. 

Serfati, Claude (2022) “The Age of Imperialism Continues: Putin Proves It”, Viento Sur, 04/21/22. 

Slobodian, Quinn (2021) Globalists. Madrid: Capitán Swing. 

Smith, Ashley (2024) “Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today”, Viento Sur, 06/04/24. Available in English at https://links.org.au/imperialism-and-anti-imperialism-today

Toussaint, Eric (2024) “The BRICS Summit in Russia Offered No Alternative”, Viento Sur, 10/30/24. 

Urbán, Miguel (2024) Trumpisms. Neoliberals and Authoritarians . Barcelona: Verso.

 

Moral Suicide

by Michael Brenner / November 21st, 2024

Western societies are committing moral suicide in Palestine. Collective suicide always is an ugly business to observe – especially when it’s your own country debasing itself. Yet, we seem unfazed. Indeed, we redouble our acts of inhumanity as if reiteration somehow normalizes the perversity of what we have done. The systematic insulating of ourselves from the magnitude of our turpitude is all the more remarkable for its requiring the constant filtering of graphic images of odious criminality to which we are accomplices. There may be some faint recognition, subliminally, of our culpability in the diligence with which dissenters and truth-tellers are suppressed and punished. That repression, an insult to our supposedly hallowed civic principles, is the most immediate price Western societies are paying for this depravity.

Other deleterious consequences will register down the road. For the disconcerting truth is that the majority of the world sees our sins for what they are, and scorns out gross hypocrisy. In America and Europe, we pay scant attention to what the ‘others’ think – out of long habit. They are discounted. Our elites in particular seem to feel that – like the proverbial tree falling in the silent forest – if we don’t hear it, there is no sound made. There is a sound, of course. We soon will learn that the falling tree has brought down power lines and blocked roads. That is to say, the reactions of the ‘others’ – China, Russia, India, Brazil, Indonesia along with the rest of South/Southeast Asia, the greater Middle East, Africa, and most of Latin America – will cause us considerable, tangible harm. The ensuing impact on Western governments’ status and influence in the world is being greatly accentuated by the collapse of their moral authority.

So, our overall losses will be profound – in practical terms, in the serious degradation in public discourse and civil liberties at home. Any move toward restoration will be retarded by lost self-esteem accompanied by a deep reluctance to face the shame were our deeds exposed and recognized. For once one has demonized Palestinians in general as guilty, thereby justifying gruesome acts, it becomes almost impossible to retreat into a position of condemning those selfsame acts of criminal vengeance that you previously blessed since that means inculpating oneself.

What this tells us is that the phenomenon that we are describing is most pronounced among Western political elites. There:  mutually reinforcing collective emotion, uniform attitudes and entrenched reference points combine to produce perverse behavior. The extremity of callousness toward the genocide of Palestinians, the enthusiastic cheerleading for the Israeli atrocities, the tangible support for this most grotesque campaign of elimination, the deaf ear to desperate pleas for humanitarian aid, inflicting additional pain by the summary defunding of UNHCR – together form a pattern of behavior that borders on the sadistic. It obliges us to ask a painful question: are we witnessing the final playing out of the West’s long felt (and more recently sublimated) compulsion to abuse ‘other’ peoples in order to affirm their own superiority and prowess? A contemptuous Parthian shot as Westerners sense the turn of the historical wheel of fortune – with the Jews providing the perfect cover?

Explanations of how we willfully inflicted these wounds upon the body politic, and our moral foundations, without evident cause or interest do not come readily at hand. For the tangled causal threads lie deep within ourselves. Self-reflection is always discomforting, often agonizing, and – in the West these days – simply intolerable.

As to America, isn’t it fanciful to imagine a society that has selected a freakish Fascist like Trump – for a second time – as its leader (while deluding itself that there is no historic deviation from its honored path of enlightened politics) could have the emotional stability and strength of character to admit its heinous sins committed against the Palestinians?

One singular feature of the current situation stands out: it is all about Israel and Jews. That evokes a host of deep emotions that shape attitudes and actions. The following essay addresses that topic. It was written a year ago. The first part focuses on Europe. It then expands the analysis to cover the United States in the context of Western societies’ historical condescendence of the non-West.

I. Europe -Jews-Muslims
Europe has an obsession about Jews. For nearly 2 millennia, it shunned them, despised them and persecuted them. Now, after a respite of a few decades, it condemns and abuses Muslims in a similar way – all in the name of supporting Jews.  Israel’s inhumane treatment of the Palestinians – culminating in their massacre and mass eviction from Gaza – leaves Europeans unmoved. European political elites above all.  Instead, they cheer on the Israelis, outdo themselves in effusive displays of solidarity, in the quick dispatch of weapons so that the IDF can better carry out their odious campaign, in providing instant validation for the most outrageous lies in the wake of the most outrageous atrocities.  Propinquity has accentuated their moral support. Leaders scurry to Tel Aviv to get as close to the action as possible and to steal a photo of themselves embracing Bibi Netanyahu – a copy for the evening news, a copy for the next campaign brochure, a copy for the eventual memoir.

The West generally clearly has a big problem with matters of religion, race and ethnicity. It is multiform, it mutates, it waxes and wanes, it shifts focus and fixation – but it remains lodged in the collective psyche. While this obviously is not universal among Europe’s population of 400 million, it is manifestly prevalent and deep-seated. When the stimulus is strong and acute, it flares like a gas field when the drill hits paydirt. The entire panoply of institutions – public and private – rise up as if choreographed to vent the same emotions, make the same harsh, unqualified judgments, use the same crude slogans, drape themselves in the same banners of self-righteousness and self-proclaimed moralism. Government leaders, politicos, media, pundits, make the same cacophonous noises, aggressively impose the same uniformity of opinion, and punish the few dissenters.

Thus, the exaltation of the Jews of Israel – honored and cosseted – is matched by the dehumanization of Palestine’s Muslims. Of course, it is not just the long-suffering Palestinians who are at once denied – in principle – the right to the privileged status of victimhood and collectively are condemned as guilty of the most heinous crimes committed by al-Qaeda, the Islamic State or Hamas. Men, women, children – without exception. It is all Muslim communities – Islamo-phobia.

What are the sources of this psychopathology? Some are immediately identifiable. 1) The residual, latent desire to absolve Europe of the sins committed against the Jews ever since they were stigmatized as the killers of the Christians’ Lord & Saviour. It took roughly 1,900 years for the truest Jew-haters to take the final, macabre act of revenge. Volunteers from 16 European countries formed SS divisions that participated – directly or indirectly (the largest contingents made up of Ukrainians). That holocaust had a powerful sobering effect on the contemporary soul of European Christians whether believers, practicing or nominal. The fears, wounds and pangs of conscience associated with it gradually have faded into the background and discrimination of Jews largely has gone away  – despite the attempts in recent years to inflate every minor incident as part of an campaign to conflate criticism of Israel with old-fashioned anti-Semitism. As a consequence of the campaign’s success, antipathy toward Israel aroused by its actions in Gaza, the number of those incidents has risen. The confected identity of Judaism with a rogue Israeli state is a boon for the die-hard anti-Semites.

The very words ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israel’ have the power to paralyze European minds and consciences. Again, most strikingly among the political class. Hence, Britain’s most erudite commentator renowned for his frankness and rare skill at cutting through official cant and mendacity, declares himself unable to pronounce on who destroyed the hospital in Gaza – hiding behind the weasel words ‘we should await the outcome of an impartial United Nations investigation.’ Who did the evil deed? The people who already had dropped 1,500 bombs on Gaza City or Ali Baba & the 40 Thieves? Make your choice – personal preference. Hence, French President Emmanuel Macron bans all protests that express sympathy for the Palestinians on the grounds that they cause Jews/Israel emotional distress. He then makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to urge the Israelis to pursue Hamas “without mercy” – adding, for the record, “within the law.” (His recent conversion ‘On The Road To Damascus/Berlaymont/Turtle Bay’ lifts the ban only on himself).  One is reminded of Peter O’Toole (aka T.E. Lawrence) shouting the command “no prisoners!” as he drives his Arab army to throw themselves on a retreating Turkish column. Without the hypocrisy of adding “within the law”.

Hence, German authorities ruthlessly enforce their own ban on Gaza-sympathy protests and threaten criminal prosecution of participants. Foreign Minister Baerbock uses a Tel Aviv platform to inform the world that “Israel cares about the welfare of Gazans.” Hence, the Prime Minister-designate of the U.K., Keir Starmer, conducts Stalinist-style purges from the Labour ranks of anyone who utters a word critical of Israel – that includes Corbyn now obliterated from party annals. No surprise that he now demands explicitly, and in a public interview, that the party’s official position is to give license to the Israelis to continue their bombing; to cut off all food, water, electricity; to expel the Gazans into the Sinai desert where Qatar is pressed to finance a tent city for a million or two.

Hence, on November 11 2023, the EU Foreign Ministers’ issued an official statement that “[the] EU condemns the use of hospitals and civilians as human shields in Gaza” – in what amounts to an eerie resemblance to the holocaust deniers. Hence, Joe Biden struck the same note in declaring that civilian casualties have been exaggerated by Hamas. This was the starkest evidence at that we had left the realm of reasoned and reasonable discourse for the nether world of psychopathology.

Second, relations between Europeans and Muslim communities have become increasingly fraught. Above all, the growth of large immigrant communities, settled mainly in Western Europe, has generated a host of social problems arising from the complications of imperfect cultural assimilation and the intrusions of influences from the external Muslim world. They are all too familiar: the rapid spread of intolerant, fundamentalist Islam; the threats posed by violent jihadist groups whose tentacles have reached into European cities; the turbulent state of politics across the Middle East; the periodic oil crises that made the region a tense arena for great power politics; and – by no means least – the lingering effects of Western colonialism that never have been expunged.

The two most striking features of that 450-year experience are: 1) the profound superior-inferior relationship on which it was grounded and which it entrenched in European minds; and 2) it was the ‘whites’ who were dominant and the ‘colored’ peoples who were subordinate. That too readily devolved into the racist belief that the latter were inherently inferior — somehow not quite fully human. Tho enduring psychic scars never have entirely faded — on both sides. Let’s recall that it is within our lifetime that the imperial dependents liberated themselves from thralldom – with much blood-shedding — in North Africa, Indo-China, Kenya, Angola, Indonesia, Mozambique, Iraq. More recently, wars between the West and Muslim societies have been fought in several places: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, the Sahel. All on Muslim soil. Domestic terrorists across Western Europe cite as their immediate motivation those attacks on Muslims — rather than their devotion to a Quranic jihadist creed per se.

II.
That brings our attention to the biggest external factor: the United States. More specifically, Europeans’ enduring dominant/subordinate relationship. European countries have been denatured by America, in the sense that they are shed of sovereign status and its attendant political will. That perverse trans-Atlantic bond has been cultivated by both sides. It’s significance for understanding the European attitude towards Israel/Palestine is two-fold. One, there is an eerie inversion of roles for European polities who participate in dominant-subordinate relations with both America and Arab Muslims. It matches the classic profile of the “Authoritarian Personality.” Toward the superior one is docile, obedient, obsequious; toward the inferior one is arrogant, demanding and patronizing. The latter compensates for the former in terms of maintaining a positive sense of self.

 A variation of this psychological pattern is visible in the attitude of Western government leaders toward their own populace. In effect, they assume the dominant role in treating their citizens as subordinates from whom deference is expected on matters of state. Strikingly, today we see overwhelming and growing popular advocacy of a ceasefire in Gaza while the political elites – those holding official positions, the media and the punditry – vigorously suppress the dissent. Example: London has seen an unprecedented demonstration of half a million, a reflection of public opinion that favors the ceasefire by a 3:1 margin (roughly the same in the U.S.) That in the face of bitter, slanderous denunciation from both Prime Minister Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer who vies to surpass him in passionate embrace of Bibi Netanyahu and who ruthlessly purges anybody who is disobedient to his hard line. Hence, not a single Labour or Tory M.P. joined an historic march on a Saturday at the risk of losing access to the Members’ Bar at Westminister.  [The dramatic event was all but ignored by the Establishment print media. By Sunday, all had airbrushed the story out of existence; no photo showing the massive crowd].

In more concrete ways, Europe’s vassalage to the United States obliges it to follow Washington down whatever policy road the seigneur takes – however reckless, dangerous, unethical, and counter-productive. In predictable fashion, they have walked (or run) like lemmings over whatever cliff the United States chooses next under its own suicidal impulses. So it’s been in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in regard to Iran, in Ukraine, on Taiwan and on all matters involving Israel. The string of painful failures and heavy costs produces no change in loyalty or mindset. It cannot – for the Europeans have asimilated totally the habit of deference, the Americans’ worldview, their skewed interpretation of outcomes, and their shamefully fictious narratives. The Europeans no more can throw this addiction than a life-long alcoholic can go cold-turkey.   

That condition impels them to downplay the ominous trends in American politics and foreign policy. The choice of mentally unstable and/or incompetent leaders, erratic actions by unhinged political forces, high risk ventures abroad, the baiting of designated rivals – none of it moves Europeans to throw off the yoke placed on their minds, their emotions, and their morals.

Moreover, we should bear in mind that contemporary America has become hysteria prone. First came the Global War On Terror that for twenty-odd years had it rampaging around the globe on the hunt for jihadis from the Hindu Kush to the Sahara desert while shredding its Constitutional guarantees of individual rights and due process. Then, the manic Russo-phobia: Dostoyevski removed from literature courses, Anna Netrebko summarily cancelled in all Western opera houses on the grounds that she once accompanied Putin to a fundraiser for refugees from Donetsk who fled Ukrainian artillery strikes that killed 14,000 of their fellows, boycotts of Russian goods including sewing needles, etc. etc.

Simultaneously, the conjured China ‘menace’ has been stoking our fevered imaginings. That hysteria triggered the ‘spy’ balloon psychodrama. Congruent with this psychopathological syndrome, America today is a culture where draconian measures are taken, by all manner of institutions under pressure from braying militants, to rid themselves of persons who as much as suggest that gender identity is not just a matter of personal preference.

The Europeans, for their part, are no less hysteria prone. It spreads from the United States at epidemic speed. Imagine a convent circa 1623. The most emotionally flammable young woman loses it in declaiming that she is possessed by a lecherous demonic agent. Soon, the other nuns are infected and mass hysteria breaks out. Today, when a whole society is dissociated from reality, there are no Mothers Superior or exorcists around to contain the ensuing bedlam. Indeed, the universal hysteria serves the purpose of those who calculatingly promote and use that hysteria to draw a “line of blood” between the collectivity and responsible, humane behavior. For once one has demonized Palestinians in general as guilty, thereby justifying gruesome acts, it becomes almost impossible to retreat into a position of condemning those selfsame acts of criminal revenge that you previously blessed since that means inculpating oneself. Even those prominent public figures who simply have kept silent in the face of atrocity thereby fall into this trap.

The stunning, frightening truth is that Western societies – American & European – are behaving mindlessly. For the Senate in Washington to pass a near unanimous resolution condemning what it called “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups” is a clear sign of abnormality. It is unmistakable from statements by supporters that the label is applied to anyone who protests the onslaught in Gaza or expresses support for the Palestinian people. Widespread denunciations and purges of individuals who voice those sentiments confirm that. Some might question how one can describe as hysterical the actions of private institutions and governments as well as individuals of being part of an irrational mass psychosis – and on a matter that does not concern them directly.

After all, these countries are composed of educated, autonomous, diverse members schooled in civic ethics – the majority secular and unattached to any dogmatic creed or movement. We are not speaking of medieval cloisters or theocracies or totalitarian societies. That is exactly the point. The observed phenomenon meets all of the criteria for a diagnosis of mass hysteria – speaking objectively.  Manifest hysteria where you do not expect to see it at once underscores the psychopathology and raises the most profound questions as to what species of social entity we have become. The few, very rough historical analogies are not ones we want to contemplate.

Collective hysteria does have predictable effects. One is that participants cease to think independently – some, including leaders, are unable to think at all. That is to say, to interpret reality in ways other than that dictated by the fixed, unqualified and simplistic narrative of what is happening, why it is happening, as well as with whom the rights and wrongs lie. Uniformity of outlook impervious to observed facts is what we have seen in the impassioned Russo-phobia, and now regarding the Palestinians. This phenomenon, orchestrated at the top by leaders who themselves are prey to dogmas and irrational emotions, stifles critical thought and judgment even when faced with the most stark, most bloody and gross sins against the very principles that we celebrate as underlying our morally superior Western societies.

A related effect is that deception and self-deception blend into a homogenous mindset. It is insulated from encroachments by a mental Hepa filter which keeps out anything – even the smallest particle of truth – that could stimulate doubt or self-awareness. Consider the likes of Biden, Trudeau, Sunak/Starmer, Schulz, Macron, Rutte, von der Leyen et al. Their endorsement, and thereby encouragement, of mass murder in Gaza – once expressed – becomes imprinted. Thus, if you were to probe for justification in a quiet one-on-one exchange, you would get the same canned, elusive sloganeering that marks their public statement. The mental faculty has become paralyzed. Sustaining this unnatural state is helped by the systematic suppression of dissent. Doing so serves two purposes: it keeps at bay any dissonant, reality-based idea or evidence challenging the fixed mindset, and unjust suppression/punishment of dissenters creates an additional disincentive to critical reflection since that threatens to evoke feelings of shame for those revealed misdeeds.

What this tells us is that the phenomenon that we are describing is most pronounced among Western political elites. There: hysteria, mutually reinforcing collective emotion, uniform attitudes and entrenched reference points combine to produce perverse behavior. The extremity of callousnesstoward the genocide of Palestinians, the enthusiastic cheerleading for the Israeli atrocities, the tangible support for this most grotesque campaign, the deaf ear to desperate pleas for humanitarian aid, inflicting additional pain by the summary defunding of UNHCR – together form a pattern of behavior that borders on the sadistic. It obliges us to ask a painful question: are we witnessing the final playing out of the West’s long felt (and more recently sublimated) compulsion to abuse ‘other’ peoples in order to affirm their own superiority and prowess? A contemptuous, ruthless Parthian shot as Westerners sense the turn of the historical wheel of fortune?

[The one aspect of the situation that shows a measure of conscious cerebration is the political – in particular, the electoral. It is Biden’s worries about his faltering Presidential campaign that led him to the surprise declaration that Israel was at risk of exceeding its (generous) quota in killed Palestinians. That is accompanied by a cavalier rewriting of the earlier record of when Washington promoted unrestricted Israeli retaliation and lobbied neighboring governments to accept the expelled Gazan population. Accommodating media are only too happy to go along with the mendacity since it erases memory of their own cheerleading for those draconian actions.

We should understand Emmanuel Macron’s sudden advocacy of a ceasefire in the same vein. It is a mistake to imagine that this shift was the outcome of a somber reflection on the moral and diplomatic issues involved. Macron is another one of those self-designated messiahs without message or mission – like Barack Obama – whose sole concern is self-promotion and self-advancement. In Macron’s case, he has his eye on an even bigger position than President of France – Secretary-General of the United Nations or President of the European Union. Preferably the former. So, presenting himself as a Gaza humanitarian could win him votes in the global South and also make him more palatable to Russia and China. The rest of the French political elite are still insisting that protesting crimes against humanity in Gaza is tantamount to an act of anti-Semitism.]

Back to Europe. In the Middle East, the net effects are 1) that Europe is burdened with the heavy baggage of interventions that inflame Muslim hostility toward the West, and 2) to create the psychological imperative to find some way to assuage their own sense of guilt by finding, and magnifying, the sins of their victims. That dubious enterprise acquires a thick veneer of contrived virtue by making a tight embrace of Jewish Israel the ultimate symbol of their good intentions and by blinding themselves to the transference of their accumulated guilt for historical abuse of the Jews into empathy for their former victims’ abuse of Arab Muslims.  

P.S. The internal dynamics of the United States are very similar to those of Europe – with three exceptions. One, guilt regarding historical mistreatment of Jews is largely absent. Yes, individuals may feel something about the Christian scapegoating of ‘Christ-killers,’ but generally speaking it is far more abstract. The empathy for Israel has arisen, and intensified, mainly from an instinctive sympathy for the underdog threatened by people you view negatively (1956, 1967) – a heart-wrenching narrative that has been vastly strengthened by vivid accounts, cinematic and written, of the tragic 20th Century Jewish saga. Moreover, there is the exceptional influence exerted by the powerful pro-Israel lobby.

Two, the dramatic growth in the influence of a politicized Evangelical movement has added a significant factor to the equation. The Book of Revelation is their guide and inspiration. Therein, they are told that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and Armageddon will be signaled by the restoration of the Jews in their Hebrew homeland. What happens next, of course, is blurred by both Israelis and the Evangelicals.

Three, the United States’ rededicated project to entrench its global dominance has spurred American assertiveness around the world. Its long-time focus on the Middle East for multiple reasons inclines Washington to secure what it sees as prized assets. That strong impulse is accentuated by its declining influence elsewhere in the region – especially the Gulf. With creeping doubts as to its prowess, and of its presumed calling to be the prophet of progress for all the world’s peoples, America compulsively grasps every occasion in order to confirm that it is Destiny’s child and to be reassured that its national mythology is inscribed in the heavens.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University o Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins. He was the Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner is the author of numerous books, and over 80 articles and published papers. His most recent works are: Democracy Promotion and Islam; Fear and Dread In The Middle East; Toward A More Independent Europe ; Narcissistic Public Personalities & Our Times. Read other articles by Michael.