IMPERIALISM IN SPACE

The U.S. Space Force: An Overview And Defense Primer – Analysis

Artist rendering of the Space Force X-37B Credit: US Space Force

April 18, 2026 
By Jennifer DiMascio and Hannah D. Dennis
The Congressional Research Service (CRS)


The U.S. Space Force is the sixth branch of the Armed Forces, established under the Department of the Air Force (DAF) with the enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 (FY2020 NDAA; P.L. 116-92). According to Title 10, Section 9081, of the U.S. Code, “The Space Force shall be organized, trained, and equipped to—(1) provide freedom of operation for the United States in, from, and to space; (2) conduct space operations; and (3) protect the interests of the United States in space.”

Since the creation of the Space Force, space has become an increasingly important domain for the United States—as well as for adversaries with growing space capabilities. In 2025, President Donald Trump issued executive orders to create a space-intensive initiative known as Golden Dome and to ensure “American Space Superiority.” Space Force officials are reportedly considering doubling the size of the force. Congress will play a role in deciding whether or not to fund these initiatives, and in overseeing their progress.
Why the Space Force Was Created

Since the 1980s, U.S. policymakers have become increasingly concerned about potential adversaries operating in the space domain. The United States and Soviet Union tested anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles in the 1980s. The United States last conducted such a test in 1985, citing the harm resulting debris could cause to spacecraft in orbit. The People’s Republic of China (PRC, or China) in 2007 became the third country to test an ASAT weapon. Military commanders reportedly have said the PRC test was a turning point, as it exposed a potential vulnerability of U.S. reliance on satellites. After 2007, China and Russia continued to develop military space capabilities. A decade later, some Members of Congress and the first Trump Administration proposed a distinct military service devoted to countering space, cyber space, and missile threats. The FY2020 NDAA authorized the establishment of the service on December 20, 2019.

Space Force Mission and Functions

The Space Force’s mission is to “secure our Nation’s interests in, from, and to space.” The mission statement refers to each of the service’s “core functions”:

In space. Protecting the joint force and nation from space and counterspace threats to achieve “space superiority” (the condition under which forces can operate without prohibitive interference while denying adversaries space control).

From space. Delivering global mission operations like satellite communications; positioning, navigation, and timing; and missile warning.

To space. Providing assured space access through the service’s launch, range, and control network infrastructure.

In addition to these core functions, Space Force carries out four cross-cutting enterprise functions: intelligence, cyberspace operations, command and control, and space domain awareness (detecting, characterizing, attributing, predicting, and targeting objects and activities in space).

Space Force Organization

The U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Air Force are two separate and distinct military uniformed services with the same civilian leader in the DAF. The Chief of Space Operations (CSO) is the highest-ranking uniformed space advisor and reports to the civilian Secretary of the Air Force. The current CSO, General Chance B. Saltzman, was appointed in November 2022. The Office of the CSO and the Space Force Headquarters are located at the Pentagon. The Space Force organizes, trains, and equips space force personnel, called Guardians, to support unified combatant commands such as U.S. Space Command.

The CSO oversees a three-level command structure. Two- or three-star generals lead three mission-focused field commands. Colonels lead units called deltas that are subordinate to field commands. Lieutenant colonels or majors lead smaller Space Force squadrons.

The Space Force’s three field commands are Combat Forces Command (CFC), previously Space Operations Command (SpOC); Space Training and Readiness Command(STARCOM); and Space Systems Command (SSC). CFC develops tactics, techniques, procedures, and force-generation models, among other roles. CFC is based at Peterson Space Force Base (SFB) in Colorado. STARCOM prepares and trains Guardians at Patrick SFB in Florida. SSC, based at Los Angeles Air Force Base in California, handles acquisition.

Space Force Budget

Congress appropriated the requested total of $26.1 billion for FY2026 in discretionary funding for the Space Force in the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2026 (P.L. 119-75, Division A). Congress provided funding for types of accounts that were in some cases more than (procurement and personnel) and in other cases less than (research, development, test, and evaluation [RDT&E]) the service’s request. For the Space Force, the act provided $14.9 billion for RDT&E, $5.7 billion for operations and maintenance (O&M), $4.0 billion for procurement, and $1.5 billion for military personnel (MILPERS). The FY2026 MILPERS request planned for an end-strength of 10,400 military personnel, 600 (6%) more than in FY2025. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY2026 NDAA; P.L. 119-60, §401) authorized the service’s requested increase in end strength.

According to a CRS review of FY2027 budget documents published by the Department of Defense (using a “secondary Department of War designation” under Executive Order 14347, dated September 5, 2025), in FY2026, the Space Force plans to spend $5.9 billion in mandatory defense funding from the 2025 reconciliation law (P.L. 119-21). (Such funding carried a five-year period of availability.)

For FY2027, the Space Force requested a total of $71.3 billion, according to a CRS review of the department’s budget documents. The request included $59.2 billion in discretionary funding from regular appropriations and $12.1 billion in mandatory funding anticipated to come from an FY2027 reconciliation bill. Taken together, the discretionary and mandatory request is 123% more than the FY2026 enacted total of $31.9 billion. Of the discretionary request for 2027, $38.4 billion (65%) is for RDT&E. The Space Force has also requested $9.6 billion in discretionary funding for procurement, $9.3 billion for O&M, and $1.9 billion for MILPERS. The Administration has not yet released an end strength request for FY2027.

Major Space Acquisition Programs

Congress provided FY2026 funding and DOD has requested FY2027 funding for the Space Force to develop and procure launch vehicles, spacecraft (satellites and orbital vehicles), and terrestrial systems and equipment. Major acquisition programs included the following: The National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program procures commercial launch services for the Space Force, Air Force, Navy, National Reconnaissance Office, Space Development Agency, and other government agencies. This program is intended to ensure U.S. access to space.
The GPS Enterprise provides 24-hour-a-day, worldwide, all-weather three-dimensional positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) information for military and civilian users.
Missile Warning Systems supply warning of strategic missile attacks using the existing Space-Based Infrared System. The Space Force is developing the Overhead Persistent Infrared and Resilient (OPIR) Missile Warning and Missile Tracking program. Section 8149 of P.L. 119-75 prohibited any pause, cancellation, or termination of OPIR programs.
Satellite Communications (SATCOM) Projects deliver three types of SATCOM. Strategic SATCOM refers to Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3); protected SATCOM is designed to enable communications to deployed forces in contested environments; and wideband/narrowband SATCOM is designed to offer large amounts of data transfer in less-contested environments.

Under the Proliferated Space Warfighter Architecture, the Space Force is soliciting, purchasing, and launching low-Earth-orbit satellites to create a constellation that will conduct multiple missions. The missions would overlap with the systems conducting PNT, missile warning, and communications. These satellites are intended to fly at lower altitudes and in greater numbers, providing additional capabilities and more resilience.

President Trump’s Executive Order 14186 directed the development of a next-generation missile shield called Golden Dome for America (GDA) with many space-related components. Space Force General Michael A. Guetlein is directing the effort. FY2027 budget documents detailed programs related to GDA within the Space Force, a Golden Dome Fund, the Missile Defense Agency, and other military departments.

Potential Considerations for CongressSpace Force officials reportedly have said its military and civilian workforce could double over the next decade. Congress may or may not seek information or a study about the organization, size, composition, cost, and other impacts of the possible expansion, including possible impacts on infrastructure, personnel, development and procurement programs, ground systems, and the industrial base.

Congress may or may not consider oversight of executive branch goals to develop and advance Golden Dome and ensure “American superiority in space,” including assessing related system architectures, acquisition requirements, funding, facilities, and personnel requirements for executing those plans.

About the authors:

Jennifer DiMascio, Analyst in U.S. Defense Policy
Hannah D. Dennis, Analyst in U.S. Defense Policy

Source: This article was published by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) works exclusively for the United States Congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS has been a valued and respected resource on Capitol Hill for nearly a century.

Russia After Putin – Analysis

April 18, 2026 
Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
By Philip Wasielewski


(FPRI) — Vladimir Putin, 73, has been Russia’s leader for over a quarter of a century and the driving force behind Moscow’s efforts to reassert control over its former Soviet and Tsarist empire. His eventual departure from the world stage will bring hope that a new Russian leader will end these imperial impulses and behavior. However, a review of Russian history, political culture, and elite and public opinion provides a clear warning that such hopes are unlikely to be realized. Russia after Putin is likely to be very similar to Russia under Putin.

As either president or prime minister, Putin’s 27 years in power are the second-longest period of post-Tsarist rule in Russian history after Joseph Stalin’s. Should Putin remain in office, he will surpass Stalin’s record of being in power for 30 years and 11 months in July 2030. There are no indications that, as long as he lives, Putin will give up power voluntarily.

But give up power he eventually shall, if only due to actuarial realities. The average Russian male born in Putin’s birth year of 1952 has been dead for 21 years. Granted, Putin has access to superior health care and has led an active and healthy lifestyle compared to many Russian men. An apparent germophobe, he takes exceedingly strict precautions regarding his health. Yet the day will come when Russian television programming is interrupted to play Swan Lake, the warning sign of death within the Kremlin’s walls. What then for Russia?

Exact scenarios are difficult to predict due to the uncertainty of the when and how of Putin’s demise. However, based on patterns of Russian history, the realities of its political system, the correlation of international and economic forces, and social norms including a general consensus of Russia’s national identity, a broad outline can be drawn to suggest which future is more likely than others. This article proposes that there is little hope of change in a post-Putin Russia absent revolutionary change from within the Kremlin or forced on it from without. Those scenarios are unlikely barring a major geopolitical event that transforms both how Russia is governed and how its elites and society identify themselves.

Russia’s Troubled History of Political Transitions

For the past quarter of a millennium, transitions from one Russian ruler to the next have been marked with various coups, attempted coups, and assassinations or poisonings. A peaceful transition from one ruler to the next has not been the norm.

However, another regular feature of Russian political transitions is that they do bring change in governing style, oscillating between harsher and lighter forms of rule, but always within the confines of some form of autocracy and dictatorship. Assassins (impatient with the pace of reform) ended Tsar Alexander II’s liberal era, to which Alexander III’s reaction was the consolidation of a police state. This was tempered by a more progressive domestic policy under Nicholas II, if only due to the revolution of 1905. Stalin’s terror was followed by Nikita Khruschev’s de-Stalinization and efforts at domestic reforms. When these proved unsuccessful and his foreign policy became too erratic, Khruschev was overthrown in a bloodless coup by Leonid Brezhnev. The Brezhnev years brought stability as well as stagnation. This was countered by Yuri Andropov who sought to bring discipline, energy, and a revitalized belief in Communism back into Soviet society. Only in the transition between Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko was the status quo maintained, if just because Chernenko lived for less than 13 months before being replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev. Putin ended the anarchy of the Boris Yeltsin years but also Russia’s nascent democracy.


Therefore, history suggests that a post-Putin Russian leader may bring some change compared to his predecessor. However, it also indicates that any change will be within the context of measures believed necessary to maintain the current system and not replace it. This should be understood so that in the future Western observers do not misunderstand cosmetic changes for structural ones. We should not forget past misjudgments such as the initial optimistic (and false) reports that Andropov was a closet liberal who met with dissidents to discuss their differences. Russian tsars, general secretaries, and presidents have a history of tactical changes and strategic continuity. The only exception was Gorbachev, whose reforms destroyed the ruling system by a complete misunderstanding of that system. Major changes to Russia’s current system are unlikely due to the nationwide antipathy toward Gorbachev’s tenure that led to collapse and chaos. Both the Russian people and their elites will recoil from any post-Putin leader that could be considered another Gorbachev because his legacy of catastrophic failure still permeates today.

The Structure of Putin’s Russia

Putin’s successor will have to operate, at least initially, within Russia’s present political system. He will also be influenced by international factors, economic realities, and social norms of Russia’s ruling class and society, which have been heavily affected by almost three decades of Putin’s rule including at least four years of war in Ukraine. This article will examine these factors, analyze the limits they impose on Russia’s next ruler, and describe why they are likely to result in continuity or, at best, change only around the margins in a post-Putin Russia.


Russia’s constitution states that in the event of a president’s death, resignation, or incapacitation, he will be replaced by the prime minister until elections are held in ninety days. In reality, Putin has no designated successor because it is too dangerous for any dictator to name a successor and allow opposition forces to accumulate around him. Instead, Putin balances between the leaders of various elite groups who operate the levers of coercion and oversee the sources of wealth within Russia. This balancing keeps possible successors under control by not allowing them to gain too much power. A culture of corruption adds to this internal balance of power because corruption makes all political players controllable by being compromisable.

Described as a “vertical of power,” this system is maximized to maintain Putin’s control over Russia but not transfer that control. Russia’s constitution gives this system just three months to hold elections after a president’s sudden departure. Since Russia’s electoral system is controlled by the Kremlin and will only produce results predetermined by the Kremlin, there will be little time for Kremlin elites to decide upon a new leader and arrange for the façade of an election intended to signify national approval and legitimacy.

The first challenge for any future leader after Putin will be to control a system that is both centrifugal and fragmented with reins of power emanating from the Kremlin but not touching each other. While all lines of authority center on the Kremlin, none are connected, and each are designed to balance, if not challenge, the other. The strength of each major political figure has been purposefully constrained so they cannot gain power with their resources (military or financial) alone and cannot trust those with whom they would have to coordinate to do so.

Kremlin elites live under a surveillance system maintained by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Federal Protective Service (FSO). The FSB, FSO, and other internal security organs such as the National Guard (Rosgvardia) are the primary guarantors of Putin’s system. They can also serve as a springboard for whoever wishes to gain power after Putin, and will be the new guarantors of power for whoever achieves it. Russia’s political structure is unlikely to evolve differently from the system Putin has created while these forces remain or remain unchanged.

Under these conditions, it will be difficult for a reformist leader to emerge. Since the system is not designed for shared power, the next leader will likely be someone who can move quickly to consolidate power and protect himself from competitors. This will limit his freedom of action since he cannot alienate too many Kremlin factions. As Otto von Bismarck once observed, “politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best.” While facing this internal political reality, Putin’s eventual successor will face other limiting factors.

International Factors

International factors for a new Russian leader will include the war with Ukraine (or its immediate legacy), uneasy relations with the West, and economic reliance on China. By illegally annexing Crimea, seizing the Donbas in 2014, and attacking Ukraine in 2022, Putin turned Ukraine into an implacable foe. Whether the war is ongoing when Putin leaves the political scene or there is a ceasefire, his successor will face a perpetually hostile Ukraine intent on recovering lost territories. Even with a ceasefire, Russia will have to maintain a sizeable army in its occupied lands and a war economy sufficient to support it. As long as Russia occupies Ukrainian territory, the European Union, the United Kingdom, most other industrial powers, and probably the United States will continue economic sanctions. Foreign investors will avoid Russia due to these sanctions and an investment climate that was deteriorating even before 2014.


Chinese oil and natural gas purchases and sales of dual-use technology for drones, missiles, and other weapons have provided Russia an economic and military lifeline. However, this aid has its limits. China purchased less Russian oil in 2025 than in previous years and overall trade fell as well from 2024. Chinese oil purchases are likely to decline further as Beijing implements an energy policy designed to boost energy self-sufficiency and diversify foreign sources of oil and gas. Furthermore, the war in Ukraine has cost Russia its lucrative European market for natural gas. This market cannot be replaced by a pivot to Asia due to sanctions and the limitations of Russia’s energy infrastructure, which is primarily oriented west and not east. While North Korea may provide weapons and ammunition, and India purchases its share of oil, war with Ukraine has left Russia with few trading partners. Additionally, Russia’s position in the Caucasus and Central Asia continues to decline and even historic, if minor, partners such as Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba are either no more or could soon be lost.

This means as long as Ukraine is a permanent enemy, a post-Putin ruler will have limited options to improve Russia’s economy by attracting international trade and investments. The amount of economic relief China will provide has probably been reached. This leads to the next challenge for a post-Putin ruler: improving the economy.

Economic Realities

Russia’s economy is beset by high inflation, high interest rates, and low to non-existent growth, but has low unemployment due to a labor shortage. The labor shortage ameliorates some of the other poor economic trends by allowing workers to find employment, but it also inhibits economic growth. What growth there has been in the economy has been war-related, creating items that will be soon destroyed or designed to explode after production. They neither improve Russia’s infrastructure nor help the economy create wealth. Alexandra Prokopenko best described Russia’s economic situation when she wrote that the economy is busier but poorer with each passing year of the war.

With the exhaustion of savings in the National Wealth Fund, Russia’s government is challenged to fund both its operations and the war. Income and business taxes increased in 2025 but oil revenues were less than expected due to falling world prices. This trend continued into 2026 until the war in Iran radically reversed oil prices. How long this windfall will last is unknown. It provides a welcome if temporary safety valve for Russia’s troubled economy, but no fix to many inherent problems. It may also be counterbalanced by Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil exports.

Because of sanctions, Russia cannot borrow on the international bond markets as most countries do to finance budget deficits. VAT increased from 20 to 22 percent on January 1, 2026, which is supposed to generate $14.3 billion (approximately what a seven-dollar drop in world oil prices costs the government’s budget). Moscow also plans to reduce by sixfold the level at which businesses must begin paying VAT.

Putin’s successor will need to choose between guns or butter since the economy cannot provide both. However, even with a ceasefire, any transition from a war economy to a peacetime economy could threaten the regime. A ceasefire with Ukraine will raise expectations in Russia that wartime economic sacrifices can end. These expectations are unlikely to be met.


As stated above, the requirement to keep a large Russian army on occupied Ukrainian territory means that Russia cannot fully move from a war economy to a peacetime one. Furthermore, even a limited transition is fraught with political peril for the Kremlin. The cancellation of defense contracts, the main agent of limited growth in the economy, and the resulting layoffs of defense workers will raise unemployment at the same time a number of men will be demobilized and looking for civilian jobs. A decrease in defense expenditures will also threaten many banks who have been coerced into providing unsecured credits to the military-industrial complex. High interest rates will make it hard for companies to find the capital to retool their industries back to producing consumer goods.

All of these factors point to a major recession, a normal occurrence in industrial economies once a war ends. For Russia today, even a partial transition to a peacetime economy could lead to bank failures, increased unemployment, continued inflation and high taxes, and negative growth. The Kremlin could face social unrest sparked by the realization that the end of the fighting has not brought an end to sacrifices.

Based on international and economic realities, it would be reasonable for Putin’s successor to attempt to improve international relations, especially vis-à-vis Ukraine, so as to end Western sanctions, remove the need for an army of occupation, and attract foreign investment to buffer the transition from a wartime to peacetime economy to improve life for the average Russian.

This is unlikely to happen for three reasons. First, this is what Gorbachev tried in the 1980s. That gambit cost Moscow its empire and the Communist Party its power. It is not a strategy likely to receive warm approval in the Kremlin. Second, it would require Moscow to give up territories considered to be Russian soil taken or “recovered” at a tremendous cost of human life. This would fly in the face of social norms accepted by most Russians today: elites and average citizens. Third, tension with the West provides the Kremlin with a useful scapegoat to justify economic sacrifices that cannot end.

Russia’s Social Norms

Social norms, the written and unwritten rules that govern acceptable behavior within a group, are a major influence on what is and is not possible within Russia’s body politic. The main norms applicable to a post-Putin Russia are how both Russia’s elites and society view who they are and what they want. This is often expressed in terms of a national idea or a national identity.

Per Ilya Prizel in his book National Identity and Foreign Policy, “a polity’s national identity is very much a result of how it interprets its history.” It can have an enormous impact on not just how a society sees itself but how its government conducts foreign policy based on that image. Russia’s current national identity is not just based on the past few decades of propaganda from Putin’s regime but on centuries of Russian history and political culture. It consists of a mix of Messianism, Imperialism, Eurasianism, and Re-Stalinization to create an image of a Russia oppressed by the West but also morally superior and distinct from it. The result is a national identity with a strong anti-Western animus, which is reinforced by the cult of the Great Patriotic War cultivated by Putin and memories of economic and national weakness during the 1990s. This mindset leaves little room for compromise over Ukraine or détente with the West.


Russian Messianism, the myth of Moscow being the Third Rome, implies both a civilizing mission for Russia and an accompanying need for a sphere of not just influence but control around its periphery. It also implies that its neighbors have a lack of agency to decide their own fates independent of Moscow. This is reinforced by Russian imperialism or at least nostalgia for Russian imperial power when, in the living memory of many Russians, Moscow exerted control from the Elbe River to Vladivostok and from the Arctic to the Oxus. Memories of empire are also memories of lost greatness that feed an identity wishing to return to that greatness.

Eurasianism, the belief that Russia is a unique civilization, neither Western nor Eastern, provides a distinct identity that rejects Western standards rooted in respect for the individual. Instead, Eurasianism emphasizes the importance of the “collective” over the individual and the uniqueness of the Russian soul. This is a message the Russian Orthodox Church also reinforces. While Eurasianism is not accepted by all Russians, it is consistent with a political culture that never experienced the influences of the Renaissance, Reformation, or the Enlightenment but did experience Mongol rule, centuries of autocracy, and Stalinism. Finally, the rehabilitation of Stalin’s image, the greatest mass murderer in Russian history, reinforces aspects of Russia’s national identity regarding the validity of autocracy, imperial rule, dehumanizing enemies, and mass violence to achieve social or political goals. Today, almost two-thirds of Russian citizens have a positive image of Stalin and many Russian politicians are inclined to speak of him in terms of a charismatic leader and strong statesman while hanging portraits of him in their offices.

This identity is reflected in such actions as constant conflict with the West including the use of assassinations, arson, subversion, and economic warfare; war in Ukraine that unapologetically features massive war crimes against civilians and massive casualties for Russia’s own citizens; and acceptance of economic hardships and a lack of personal liberties if in exchange citizens can still perceive themselves to be members of a great international power.

Per a 2014 Pew Research Center poll, nine out of 10 Russians supported the seizure of Crimea, believed Kyiv should accept its loss, and believed that there were parts of other neighboring states that should also belong to Russia. Even those who oppose the Kremlin can hold deep beliefs of Russian nationalism or chauvinism. This included the dissident Alexei Navalny who had espoused Russian nationalist themesregarding Central Asians and varied at times in his outlook on Crimea’s annexation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn resisted Communism but, just before his death, recommended annexing northern Kazakhstan into Russia and creating a Slavic union of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine led by Moscow. Even further back in Russian history, the great poet Alexander Pushkin opposed Tsarist autocracy but was quick to pick up his pen to support Russian imperialism in Poland as evidenced by his 1831 poem, To the Slanderers of Russia.

More recent polling indicates that while most Russians would like to see the war end, they are not willing to compromise to do so. In January 2025, a joint Chicago Council on Global Affairs-Levada Center pollindicated that three-quarters of Russians expected Russia to prevail in this war. The same poll indicated that 55 percent would like to see Russia as a great power feared and respected by other countries, rather than a country with a higher standard of living (41 percent). At the end of the year, a poll by VTsIOM reported that 70 percent of Russians expected victory in 2026. In January 2026, Levada Center sociologist Lev Gudkov reported that most Russians believe the war in Ukraine was imposed by the West and that Russia would eventually prevail. Gudkov spoke of a “militarization of consciousness” in Russia since it has experienced only six years of peace since the fall of the Soviet Union. He also highlighted a 2024 Levada Center poll that found that 65 percent of Russians agreed with the statement that, “Russia had never been an aggressor or initiator of conflicts with other nations,” up from 36 percent who believed that in 1998.


While caution should be attached to any polling done in a dictatorship, these polls, other studies, and the content of Russian state television warn that there may not be much of a gap in how ordinary Russians and the ruling elites see their national idea. Additionally, support for the war and a “my country right or wrong” attitude towards it among ethnic Russians is easier to sustain when the brunt of the war’s casualties are borne by other ethnicities and society’s outcasts.

Putin’s inner circle, from whom a successor will be drawn, is aware of these public sentiments. That group is also relatively homogenous regarding its worldview, which for most developed in Soviet times while serving in the security services or military. The one member of Putin’s inner circle who showed the slightest concern about the effects of the war in Ukraine on Russia, Dmitry Kozak, was replaced by Kremlin political chief, Sergei Kiriyenko, whose domestic portfolio now includes Russia’s relations with its so-called Near Abroad. Putin, it seems, is culling the herd so after his death there will not be a repeat of the mistake the Soviet Politburo made when they appointed from their midst a successor who destroyed them.

Whoever succeeds Putin will come from a very finite pool of candidates who have similar backgrounds and beliefs and have been together in power for years. They likely have a classic Groupthink mindset. That mindset was best expressed several years ago in an article, Putin’s Long State, by then Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov. In his article Surkov wrote that the current political order had passed its “stress tests” and “will be an effective means of survival and exaltation of the Russian nation for not only years, but also decades, and most likely the whole century.” For the inner circle, it is crucial that Putin’s death or removal means only a leadership change and not a regime change that threatens their own power, wealth, and lives.

Conclusion

Whoever replaces Putin will have limited options to improve Russia’s international and economic situations because to do so requires compromises that are unacceptable to most Russians, could threaten the stability of the regime, and would be incompatible with Russia’s self-image as a superpower. These factors are likely to take precedence over either world peace or a better economy.

Why cannot a new leader decide to end the war, blame it on Putin, and make major territorial concessions, hoping that propaganda and force would maintain his rule? One reason a future Russian leader might not make this decision is that he truly believes in the Russian national idea himself. Another reason is that he would immediately be accused of surrendering sacred Russian lands. This would provide the pretext for rivals to overthrow him. This action would have wide support from Russia’s veterans, military leadership, relatives of those killed in action, Orthodox clergy, ultranationalists, and ordinary citizens imbued with the belief that wherever the Russian flag is planted, it should never be taken down. The coup makers would gain legitimacy as patriots for doing so. Compromise over Ukraine is more likely to lead to a coup than peace.

Economic problems, unless they surpass those of the 1990s (which were bad, but most Russians can also remember surviving), will not force a post-Putin leader to take steps detrimental to his hold on power and contrary to the beliefs of most Russians. Whoever occupies the Kremlin next can never be seen as being dictated to by the West. He is therefore likely to stay on a path first trodden by Putin. This means policies that will continue to have the Russian people sacrifice, and be sacrificed, for the sake of national greatness. Russia’s future is most likely to be a real-world parallel to the perpetual war between Oceania and Eurasia in Orwell’s novel 1984.


Is this the only scenario possible for the future? No, but it is the most likely one, barring a revolutionary change in Russia’s national identity and domestic politics. Russia is unlikely to change its behavior externally until it changes its political culture and national identity internally.

The only other political transition, besides Gorbachev’s, that led to structural changes in modern Russia’s political system and foreign policy was the revolution of October 1917. Real change is unlikely unless preceded by some disaster that requires the Kremlin and Russian society to rethink their national idea as happened to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan after World War II. Such an event would have to be a major catastrophe such as the loss of Asian territories to China in the event of a Sino-Russian war. This might make Russia identify more as a European state with Western values to counterbalance Chinese hegemony. However, losing the war with Ukraine could bring a different type of revolution. Since many Russians believe they are fighting the entire West and not Kyiv, losing the war could lead to political upheaval that reinforces an anti-Western national identity with a “stab in the back” excuse for losing similar to the myth propagated by Germany’s National Socialists after World War One. Therefore, barring an internal upheaval that orients Russia in a Western direction, a change in Russian national identity is unlikely. As the century moves forward, Russia will continue to be “Putin’s Russia,” which is patterned after 18th and 19th century Tsarist Russia or, as it is known to history, Imperial Russia.

This article was reviewed by CIA’s Prepublication Classified Review Board for classified information. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

About the author: Philip Wasielewski is the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare and a Senior Fellow in FPRI’s Eurasia Program. He is a former Paramilitary Case Officer who had a 31-year career in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Source: This article was published by FPRI


Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute

Founded in 1955, FPRI (http://www.fpri.org/) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests and seeks to add perspective to events by fitting them into the larger historical and cultural context of international politics.

Donald Trump: The Forever War President

Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere is war.


A resident weeps while talking on the phone near a residential building that was hit in an airstrike  on March 30, 2026 in the west of Tehran, Iran.
(Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

LONG READ

Steve Fraser
Apr 17, 2026

TomDispatch


War against Iran. Kidnapping the president of Venezuela. Threatening to take over Cuba and Greenland. Plans to plunder the planet of its land, labor, and vital resources to feed the insatiable appetite of American capitalism are indeed afoot and, in the age of Donald Trump, U.S. imperialism is back with a particular vengeance. Not, of course, that it ever went away. In fact, it’s been there from the beginning.

After all, the United States was launched as an act of settler colonialism, dispossessing the New World’s indigenous inhabitants. President James Monroe issued what became known as the “Monroe Doctrine” in 1823, proclaiming the country’s exclusive right to determine the fate of the rest of the western hemisphere. Meanwhile, the slave trade and slavery constituted an imperial rape of Africa by America’s planter and merchant elites.

And by the turn of the twentieth century, Washington had announced its “Open Door” policy, meaning it intended to compete for access to the world’s markets while joining the European race for colonies. It proceeded to do so by brutally taking over the Philippines in 1899, while the U.S. armed forces would make regular incursions into countries in Central America to protect the holdings of American corporations and banks. And the story that began there has never ended with bloody chapters written in Guatemala, Vietnam, most recently Iran, and all too many other places.

As the dispossession of indigenous populations and the enslavement of Africans suggest, the “homeland” (itself an imperial locution) has long been deeply implicated in the imperial project. Indeed, various forms of repressive military and police measures used abroad were first tested out against labor, Black, immigrant, and native insurgents. Rebellious immigrant workers in the nineteenth century were compared to “Indian savages” as local police and federal militia treated them with equal savagery. White supremacist ideology, nurtured at home, would then be exported to the global south to justify U.S. domination there. In fact, this country’s vaunted economic prosperity for so much of the last century was premised on its exploitative access to the resources of the global south, as well as its post-World War II hegemony over Western Europe.

Donald Trump turns out to be a purveyor of both imperialism (notwithstanding his promises to “stop wars” and refrain from “forever wars”) and its toxic outcome.

Today, Donald Trump’s government exercises a reign of terror over our immigrant brothers and sisters, millions of whom are here because their homelands were economically despoiled by this country’s business and financial powerhouses. Homegrown resistance to our imperial adventures abroad has always been met by government repression, the stripping away of democratic rights, and the creation of a surveillance state.

In the Beginning

The United States was always conceived as an imperial project, its DNA infected from the outset.

The earliest settlers were simultaneously colonial subjects of the British and other European empires, and themselves colonizers exercising their dominion over indigenous populations. Native Americans — agrarian communities, hunting and trading tribes, seafaring and fishing societies — were systematically stripped of their lands, resources, and ways of life (not to speak of their actual lives) by the newly arrived settler colonials.

Sometimes their undoing was left to the silent workings of the marketplace. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the fur trade catered to the appetites of the world’s aristocracy — in Russia, China, and across Europe. Native American fur-trapping and trading societies entered into commercial relations with fur merchants like John Jacob Astor, the country’s first millionaire. But the terms of trade were always profoundly unequal and eventually undermined the viability of those fur-trapping communities.

Often enough, however, the colonizers resorted to far less “pacific” kinds of actions: military force, legal legerdemain, illegal land seizures, and even bio-warfare, as European-borne diseases nearly wiped out whole indigenous populations. The social murder of those peoples went on through the nineteenth century, from “the Trail of Tears” (the forced removal of the “five civilized tribes” from Georgia in 1830 on the orders of President Andrew Jackson) to the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890.

Imagine the United States minus that historic erasure.

There’s no way, since the very geographic borders we take for granted would be utterly different. Much of this country’s most fertile land, crucial water resources, mineral-rich deposits, as well as the industries that grew up around them using buffalo hides for conveyer belts and horses to pull street-cars (not to speak of the oil wells that made certain Americans so rich drilling in territory that once had been part of the Comanche empire) would have remained outside the “homeland.” Where would America the Great have been then?

Less tangibly, but perhaps more essentially, without that emotional elixir, the sense of racial superiority that still poisons our collective bloodstream and helps justify our imperial brutality abroad, that sense of being perpetually at war with savages — President Trump only recently called Iran’s leaders “deranged scumbags,”— who knows what this country might have been.

Slavery and Manifest Destiny

Of course, slave labor disfigured the homeland for centuries, thanks initially to the transatlantic slave trade conducted by the imperial powers of Europe and eventually the United States. Shipowners, merchants, bankers, slave brokers, and planters, backed by the authority of the Constitution, grew extraordinarily wealthy by kidnapping and plundering African peoples.

Wealth accumulated in the slave trade or thanks to slavery found its way into industrial development, especially of the textile industries that powered the earliest stages of this country’s industrial revolution. We may fancy the notion that such a revolution was homegrown, a manifestation of a kind of native inventiveness, but factoring in the imperial assault on Africa makes the homeland’s vaunted industrial miracle seem less miraculous.

Territorial acquisition is often a hallmark of the imperial quest. And so it was in the case of this country’s expansion into the southwest and west, sometimes by purchasing land, but all too often by war. In fact, the seizure of a vast region that today stretches from Texas to California — sometimes referred to as the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) — was actually an invasion driven by the appetites of the slave owners of the American South for fresh lands to cultivate. Indeed, the most avaricious leaders of the Southern planter class wanted to take parts of Central America to extend the reach of the slave economy, as one imperial adventure whetted the appetite for another.

The phrase “Manifest Destiny,” the rubric deployed by American politicians to explain away their predatory behavior as something fated to be, remains part of an inbred American hubris. We, of course, make war and destroy only for the most idealistic motives: to save democracy, uplift the poor, hunt down demonic rulers, or bring the blessings of the American way of life to the benighted.

Exacerbated as well through the experience of conquest was a racialized ideology already deeply embedded in the country’s psyche. If, today, Donald Trump’s America is infected with an aversion to Latinos (not to mention African Americans), or immigrants of any non-White kind, look to the American imperial experience for its source. Earlier exercises in racism, including lynchings and church burnings in the Jim Crow South, became dress rehearsals for assaults on Muslims in our own moment of Trumpian paranoia.

Imperialism Without Colonies

Looked at from this vantage point, the American story turns out to be a serial exercise in imperial ambition. And yet, compared to its European competitors, the United States had precious few actual colonies.

True, after the Spanish-American War of 1898, it did run Cuba for a time, while establishing an unofficial protectorate over the Philippines (after waging a horrific counterinsurgency war there against a guerrilla independence movement). During that conflict U.S. forces mastered techniques — the establishment of concentration camps, for example — that they would deploy later against similar anti-colonial movements, particularly in Vietnam in the twentieth century.

Of course, the U.S. military also occupied various Central American nations — the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, among other places — during the opening decades of the twentieth century, taking control of their government finances and so ensuring that they paid debts owed to American banks. That was the original version of what came to be known as “gunboat diplomacy” and is now being revisited. (Think of the recent capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife by the Trump administration.)

At the beginning of the previous century, Secretary of State John Hay developed a different approach to establishing American imperial hegemony, something less haphazard than those semi-colonial one-offs. In 1899, he announced an “Open Door” policy which, on the face of it, seemed eminently fair. The United States claimed that it sought equal access to markets, particularly China’s, that had previously been carved into exclusive zones by the great European powers.

Opening that door eventually led to American global economic dominance, not counting the part of the world controlled for about 75 years by the Soviet Union (in parts of which China is now dominant). U.S. economic preeminence after World War II, backstopped by the world’s most powerful military machine, proved irresistible, while functionally Europe became something like an American colonial possession under the auspices of the Marshall Plan and NATO. That door, in other words, was opened wider than Hays had ever imagined.

Mind you, his imperial perspective was trained not only on the outside world but on the homeland as well. By the turn of the twentieth century, this country’s business and political elites were worried that the domestic market for America’s huge industrial and agricultural output was fast approaching exhaustion. Periodic and severe depressions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century seemed like evidence of that.

What was needed, key Washington strategists came to believe, was an “open door” for U.S. commodities and capital investment globally. Such a policy would, they believed, not only ensure American prosperity but also dampen the chronic class warfare between the haves and have-nots that had raged in this country throughout the Gilded Age, threatening the viability of American capitalism.

From the close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, many people believed that the United States had entered a “second civil war,” as the titans of industry (sometimes backed by the country’s armed forces) faced off against the mass strikes of working people and farmers trying to survive the ravages of a capitalist economy. Ever since then, this country would have been inconceivable without its various versions of “open door” imperialism to buoy up the home front and pacify the natives — that is, us.

Acting the role of the hegemon, while lucrative, is also expensive. Public money still pours into sustaining and enlarging the warfare state to ward off all challenges to American supremacy. (The Pentagon only recently, for instance, asked for another $200 billion for its war in Iran.) It does so at the expense of social welfare programs, while starving investment in productive activities like the development of alternative forms of energy and new infrastructure, housing, and rapid transit that would improve life for everyone.

At times, as in the case of the Vietnam War, the warfare state has engendered full-blown domestic economic crises. Vietnam led to punishing years of hyper-inflation followed by years of economic stagnation. Moreover, such war expenditures nearly collapsed the world’s financial system in 1968.

Today, we may be beginning to experience something similar as the global economy teeters on the edge of collapse thanks to Trump’s war on Iran.

Democracy and Imperialism

From the beginning, however, there was resistance to the homeland’s imperialism. Native peoples waged war. Slaves revolted. Mexicans became anti-imperialists. Abolitionists took on the slavocracy. The Spanish-American War elicited opposition from middle-class folk and public figures like Mark Twain. During World War I, thousands of anti-war radicals had their organizations raided and their newspapers shut down by government decree, while some were imprisoned and some deported. Similarly, government repression sought to quell the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s, culminating in the killing of four Kent State students in 1970.

Democracy and civil liberties, thought to make up the essence of the homeland’s civic religion, can’t survive the imperial drive. Today, violations of the most basic rights to free speech, privacy, a fair trial, and the right to vote are appalling and commonplace. Immigrants, often here because they couldn’t survive the ravages of American capitalism in their homelands, are treated like outlaws. The most basic constitutional requirement — the exclusive right of Congress to declare war — is ignored with impunity (and had been long before Trump took over). The imperial state, the surveillance state, and the authoritarian state are hollowing out what’s left of the democratic state.

Imperialism does massive and fatal damage abroad. The wars in Gaza and Iran are the latest bloodbaths for all to see. Less visible are the wages of imperialism at home. An equation might clarify the historical record: The Imperium = land, labor, resources, power, and wealth. The Homeland = cultural brutalization, dispossession, fear, misogyny, racism, repression, slavery, tyranny, and war.

Donald Trump turns out to be a purveyor of both imperialism (notwithstanding his promises to “stop wars” and refrain from “forever wars”) and its toxic outcome. Conjoined in his person is the perfect amalgam of America’s imperial history of aggressive aggrandizement and the ubermensch cruelty that history has instilled in the American psyche.


© 2023 TomDispatch.com


Steve Fraser
Steve Fraser is a historian, writer, and editor. His research and writing have pursued two main lines of inquiry: labor history and the history of American capitalism. He is the author of Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion. His previous books include The Age of Acquiescence and The Limousine Liberal. He is a co-founder and co-editor of the American Empire Project.
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Three principles of ecosocialist politics

By Kai Heron

Published 14 April, 2026

First published at Rupture.

Cast your memory back to September 2019. Six million people took action globally in a week-long wave of climate protests. From Angola, to Cuba, Germany, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and even Antarctica, people walked out of school or work and took to streets and squares. I was one of them. On a clear autumnal day, our hundreds-strong contingent of workers and students marched from Manchester’s Oxford Road to join thousands more in St. Peter’s Square, the site of the Peterloo Massacre and now a sanitized city plaza. From there, we marched into the streets of Manchester’s gentrified areas of the Northern Quarter and Ancoats, once described by Engel’s as ‘hell on earth’.1

Our route, pre-agreed by the event’s organisers and Manchester’s police, was not meant to be a tour of Manchester’s radical past. Instead, it led us across rather than along Manchester’s major throughways and eventually into a parking lot ringfenced for private development into luxury apartments. We were marching, in other words, into a holding pen. As we drew near, plans started to form about refusing to enter the car park. Why not hold up traffic for a little longer? Why not risk arrest and make a real show of force? Others disagreed. We were making a show by marching through Manchester. More disruption would only irritate the road-using public and cause issues for the event’s organisers. Agreement was impossible. Some blocked the roads. Some walked into the parking lot to hear rousing talks from guest speakers. Many more dispersed, the energy of the moment lost, and in hindsight, never to return.

A few short months later, Covid-19 forced Britain and much of the world to go into lockdown. As politically and strategically confused as our event was, it turned out to have been a nodal point on a day that arguably marked the apex of the global climate movement. Six years later, it is clear that this kind of climate struggle — one over the climate in the abstract, one that asks the state to act on our behalf — is dead. It is equally clear that this is no bad thing. Much of the climate movement’s energy rightly swung into solidarity actions with Palestine as it suffered the full force of Zionist incursion and genocide. This struggle has radicalised generations of organisers, forcing connections to be drawn between capitalism, imperialism, racism and ecology in ways that no film, book, or lecture ever could.

Once these lessons have been learned, environmental politics in the imperial core can never be the same again. It must be bolder, more savvy about state repression, and more dialled into the lived experience of climate breakdown both at home in the imperial core and in the global peripheries. And it must be single-mindedly focused on the shared drivers of climate breakdown and the Zionist genocide: the capitalist world-system itself. Climate politics, in other words, must be ecosocialist.

The shape, form, and guiding principles of this renewed Ecosocialism are only now emerging in conversations among climate organisers, anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists. Ultimately, they will be determined in the struggles to come. Here, however, I present three that I believe are as self-evident as they are indispensable.

1. Ecosocialism is a revolutionary politics, so act as if the revolution has already begun

The human and non-human world is beset by a cascading series of social, economic, and ecological crises that require urgent and radical intervention. For decades, climate scientists have been sounding the alarm about how serious things have become, to no avail. Last year, the Guardian newspaper interviewed 380 leading climate scientists and asked them how they felt about the future.2 The Mexican scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota answered in this way: “Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken. After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought that governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”

This is a common way of thinking among the climate science community. It is a fanciful way of thinking. The idea that governments will ‘listen to the science’ — a slogan that is incidentally used by Extinction Rebellion and that was used by the younger, more naïve Greta Thunberg — assumes that politics is conducted in the realm of ideas. It assumes that if we can just accumulate enough evidence, and if we can speak that evidence loudly enough to power, then it will act and it will act in the way that we want it to.

The belief that world leaders will ‘listen to the science’ is fanciful, not because world leaders don’t listen but because they are listening and what they’re doing in response is not only insufficient but harmful. With the exception of the Trump administration, the imperial core is acting on the climate crisis, and its answer is more market-based solutions and militarisation. It doesn’t matter how refined our climate models become, how precisely we can predict when and where the next disaster will hit, how many people we can bring into the streets to ask nicely for swift action. No amount of granular evidence, and no amount of forceful argumentation, will make them change their course.

Cerezo-Mota also repeats another common idea: if the crisis gets bad enough, then surely the public will wake up and act. She mentions Hurricane Otis. Otis was the first hurricane to ever make landfall at intensity 5. At 1:45 am local time on the 25th of October 2023, Otis slammed into Mexico’s coastal city of Acapulco at around 165 miles an hour, ripping apart houses, tossing cars, and cutting out power and drinking water. Heavy rains caused floods and landslides that tore up the region’s coastlines, mountains, and riverbanks. Not only was Otis the most destructive hurricane in Mexico’s history, but it has increased the region’s long-term vulnerability to wildfires, floods, and landslides. But outside of the region affected, who remembers Hurricane Otis? Who hears mention of it among the world’s politicians? Or, more recently and closer to home, who hears much talk about how the heatwave that hit Europe at the end of June this year killed 2,300 people across 12 major cities?

Unfortunately, the idea that if things get bad enough, then people will act is misguided. After Covid-19, we know that even a worldwide crisis won’t necessarily make people act in ways we might like them to. COVID is an important example because it is as much a continuing global health crisis as it was an ecological crisis unleashed by capital’s drive towards urbanisation and its correlated destruction of forest habitats. Again, the mistake is to think that people aren’t acting. The uncomfortable truth is that everyone, right now, is acting just how they would act if we were in the midst of not one but several world-historical emergencies. The climate crisis, ecological collapse, genocide, and the construction of a profoundly racist proto-fascistic post-liberal order in the imperial core.

People are acting how they do — which by and large is by getting on with their normal lives — not because they don’t care. Many care deeply. So deeply, in fact, that they can’t stand to look at the images coming out of Palestine or to think too hard about the world we are passing onto future generations. The problem is that most of us, and especially working class people who must be at the forefront of a revolutionary politics, don’t have channels of action available to us that empower us to act differently. We are overburdened by work and by care commitments. Burned out and in need of a rest that never arrives because no sooner do we get on top of things than we are hit by the next personal or global crisis.

This, I would wager, includes many socialists. Socialists know that it is only through careful social and economic planning that we can heal the human and non-human worlds that have been degraded, exploited, and destroyed by capital for over 500 years. And that it is only by abandoning the idea of ‘national security’ in favour of genuine internationalism that we can act at the scale required to meet what is a planetary crisis. We also know that none of this is possible through reform. It requires a communist revolution. But who has time for that? Who has the capacity to organise more than they already do?

From an ecosocialist perspective, this is a false line of questioning. Ecosocialism is not a subjectivist politics. It does not say that the goal is to make everyone a card-carrying ecosocialist, as nice as this might be. It does not say that the revolution will take place on a specific date in the distant future. Instead, ecosocialism recognises that in some sense the revolution has already begun in the form of global working class and peasant struggles to wrest ourselves away from capital’s stranglehold on our collective reproduction, so that we can live freely and flourish together. People are fighting because they must.

This already active revolutionary force, this real movement that might abolish the present state of things, will only pick up speed and avoid defeat if those of us who are card-carrying ecosocialists can shake off the cynicism that sometimes enters our ranks, and if we can pitch our political strategies at the right level for the current conditions of struggle and levels of class consciousness.

This is important because for the revolution to succeed, it must be a popular revolution, which means that it must appeal to and empower the vast majority. The masses must be able to look at images of the latest hurricane making landfall thousands of miles away or the latest Palestinian body smeared across the rubble of their family home by a GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb and know that there is something they can do about it. And, crucially, it must draw in those segments of the working class tempted by the false reactionary solutions to the world’s problems spouted by the far far-right. Which brings us to the second principle of ecosocialism.

2. Never separate environmentalism from social issues

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘environment’? Perhaps a green landscape filled with trees, fields, and wildlife. Perhaps an ocean. Most people don’t think of city centres, suburbs, housing estates, sewers, airports, and shipyards.

In the 1970s, the Black Radical Nathan Hare penned a brief essay called ‘Black Ecology’.3 In it, he made a distinction between what he called white ecology and black ecology. White ecology meant idyllic vistas of trees, fields, and frolicking wildlife. A landscape strangely devoid of people. Black ecology meant the urban ghetto. A geography choked with people forced into inhospitable conditions by profiteering landlords, formal and informal racial segregation, and gentrification. Black ecology is the house infested withants. It’s the mould colonising people’s lungs, choking them of air because of damp issues landlords refuse to treat. It’s the child born with learning difficulties because of high atmospheric levels of nitrogen oxide in dense urban environments.

Hare’s point was that the ‘environmental movement’ that had blossomed after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 had made the mistake of separating environmentalism from where people live, work, and die. It had cleaved environmental issues away from power, race, gender, and class.

Hare’s criticisms are worth repeating because parts of the environmental movement, and indeed some ecosocialists, have still not learned the lessons he hoped to teach. Environmentalism isn’t a discrete ‘issue’ to be added to a long list of discrete ‘issues’ we fight for. Justice is not mathematics. We don’t reach it by adding climate justice to anti-racist justice, to feminist justice, to disability justice, and so on. Instead, we must recognise that ecological questions are already a part of every single struggle.

Sometimes this is obvious. Fighting to retrofit old housing stock, for example, is good for the environment because it reduces the amount of energy we need to heat our homes, and it’s good for workers because using less energy means bills are cheaper. But the connections aren’t always so clear. Ecosocialism is a politics that is adept not only at saying that every class struggle is an ecological struggle, and every anti-racist struggle an ecological struggle. It is a politics highly skilled in integrating these elements into one struggle in a compelling and popular fashion.

Today this skill is more important to develop than ever. The right has unfortunately constructed an extremely dangerous form of fossil fuel populism based on the idea that environmental issues are too expensive. The imperial core’s workers, they argue, are being asked to foot the bill for an energy transition that they can’t possibly afford, and all because of sensationalism around how severe the climate crisis is. This story has been so successful that large parts of the public in Europe have fully absorbed it. A recent study, for example, found that the British public overestimate the cost of Net Zero by a shocking 14,000%.4

An ecosocialist politics doesn’t try to educate the public about the true costs of net zero. In part because netzero exists to permit further fossil fuel combustion and not to decarbonise the global economy, but mainly because an ecosocialist politics knows that you don’t move people with arguments, you move them by proving in practice that an ecosocialist present and future means a better quality of life for them and their loved ones.

As Amilcar Cabral says, ‘always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children’.5

3. Anti-imperialism is not an optional extra

It wasn’t that long ago that talk of imperialism among the West’s left was the narrow pursuit of traditional Marxist groups influenced by Lenin. Today, in the wake of Israel and its US and European ally’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, the word imperialism is on everyone’s lips. And yet it’s fair to say that there isn’t strong agreement about what imperialism is. Is it the foreign policy of the US, its allies, and regional proxies? Is it when extra-economic violence is used against a people? Is it evidenced by value drains from the periphery of the world-system to the core? Is Russia imperialist? Is China?

From these disagreements it follows that there is disagreement about what it means to fight against imperialism. The fight to end the genocide in Gaza is obvious, but it is also obvious that this won’t end imperialism. If our anti-imperialism is to mean something more than solidarity with Palestine — and it must — then an ecosocialist politics today must become much clearer on what an anti-imperialist politics involves and what it asks of us as individuals and collectives based in the imperial core.

In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin warned that many Marxists were ‘internationalist in words, and social chauvinist in deed’.6 He was referring to the decision among European communist parties to support war credits for their bourgeoise governments. Today, ecosocialism must grasp that many are still internationalist and anti-imperialist in words and social chauvinist in deed, but in more subtle ways.

Building trade unions in the core to manufacture green products that will be sold to the global south for a profit, or which they can only access through the purchase of loans granted by Western banks and international organizations, is imperialist. Rewilding parts of our landscapes to meet carbon targets, which studies show offset ecological destruction and emissions to the Global South, is imperialist.7 Suggesting that we don’t need to reduce our overall energy and material consumption in the imperial core as part of a transition towards an ecosocialist future is imperialist. Critiquing the so-called ‘extractivist’ project of development in states like Venezuela, or questioning the democratic credentials of sanctioned countries like Cuba, is imperialist. These things are imperialist because they are social chauvinist. Unfortunately, social chauvinism is all too common among some so-called socialists and among environmentalists in the imperial core.

All of this stands as confirmation of what Lenin said internationalism must mean for those in the imperial core:

internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice.8

What does this mean today? To make up for the inequality that exists in practice means to dismantle the apparatus of imperialism at home, which is an apparatus that differentially exploits both us and those in the periphery. Imperialism is the form that global capitalism takes today, and capitalism is an impediment to our collective flourishing. It is what stops us having more free time, better working conditions, more biodiverse landscapes, good quality nutrient dense food, and so much else besides.

‘The main enemy’, as Karl Liebknecht said, ‘is at home.’9 Ecosocialism must grasp this intuitively and act on it, resisting imperialist foreign policy, disrupting weapons manufacturing, breaking apart chauvinistic trade unions, materially assisting anti-imperialist forces internationally, and materially supporting movements for popular development in the Global South, because our lives, and the lives of workers everywhere, depend on it.

This essay is a lightly edited version of a talk Kai Heron gave at the RISE Summer Camp in August 2025. Kai Heron is a Lecturer in Political Ecology at Lancaster University. He is the co-author with Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell of Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future (Pluto Press, 2025)

• 1

  Engels, Friedrich, and Tristram Hunt. 2009. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Edited by Victor Kiernan. Penguin Classics.

• 2

  Carrington, Damian, Damian Carrington Environment editor, Alessia Amitrano, et al. 2024. ‘“Hopeless and Broken”: Why the World’s Top Climate Scientists Are in Despair’. Environment. The Guardian, May 8.

•  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/may/08/hopeless-and-broken-why-the-worlds-top-climate-scientists-are-in-despair

• 3

  Hare, Nathan. 1970. ‘Black Ecology’. The Black Scholar 1 (6): 2–8.

• 4

  Oliver, Craig. 2025. ‘The Public Don’t Understand Net Zero - It’s Time for New Arguments’. City AM, June 16. https://www.cityam.com/the-public-dont-understand-net-zero-its-time-for-new-arguments/

• 5

  Cabral, Amilcar. 1965. ‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories...’ Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1965/tnlcnev.htm.

• 6

  Lenin, Vladimir. 2010. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Penguin Classics.

• 7

  Balmford, Andrew, Thomas S. Ball, Ben Balmford, et al. 2025. ‘Time to Fix the Biodiversity Leak’. Science 387 (6735): 720–22. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adv8264.

• 8

  Lenin, Vladimir. 1922. ‘The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”’. Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm.

• 9

  Liebknecht:, Karl. 1915. ‘The Main Enemy Is At Home!’ Marxists.Org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1915/05/main-enemy-home.htm.

Capitalism is the problem. Ecosocialism is the solution.

By Harry Fairless

Published 13 April, 2026

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At one point in the 1977 novel, Ceremony, by Native American author and storyteller Leslie Marmon Silko of the Laguna Pueblo people, the narrator, focalised through the perspective and voice of the protagonist Tayo (a Laguna Pueblo man), states:

The [Native American] people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren lands and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. (Ceremony, 189-90)

This passage powerfully captures the destructive and alienating effects of capitalist society, particularly within a settler-colonial context. It suggests that capitalism and ecological damage are intimately tethered. The narrator laments the “barren lands and dry rivers” that the “destroyers” — the rulers and the dominant class — have caused with their rapacious ideology and actions.

And it is not just the Indigenous peoples of the land who suffer the consequences, but also white settlers and their descendants. The narrator tells us that the deleterious impacts of such a system on white people are evident, in part, in “the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel”.

Alienation

This description resonates with Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx writes,

the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is, therefore, inseparable from the production of commodities. (Capital, Volume 1, 165)

A curious feature of capitalism is that it masks the social nature of its form of production, making it appear as if the commodities produced by “the aggregate labour of society” were actually produced “naturally”, autonomously, of their “own accord”, especially when they are encountered as finished products in the market to be bought and consumed (Capital, Volume 1, 165). In other words, the reality of the complex processes of capitalist production that go into making a commodity (with its sophisticated supply chains, divisions of labour, etc) are hidden or reified in the commodity that comes out at the end of the production process.

An implication of commodity fetishism is that instead of having agency over the things we produce, the things we produce dominate us; we become subordinated to the primacy of exchange value, profit and the commodities that are made and sold to realise these things. We are presented with a topsy-turvy situation in which there is an inversion between subject and object. It is as if we hand over our active subjectivity, willpower and productive capacities to the commodities we create in exchange for the commodity’s passive objectivity, which we internalise. In short, humans become the object while the commodity becomes the subject.

The quote from Ceremony about the dissolution of people’s “consciousness into dead objects” echoes Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism. Silko’s novel implies a connection between this sort of alienation and environmental devastation. The narrator mentions the “dead objects” (or commodities) of “plastic and neon”, “concrete and steel”. Marxists and socialists are, of course, not against industrialisation in general, but we can infer from Silko’s quote a reproach of the capitalist mode of production and its pollution, wastefulness and exploitation of nature (plastic and neon especially being common signifiers of these sorts of things).

The final sentence of the passage offers a rather telling simile:

And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead.

This image of a lifeless, calcified leaf stem — a symbol of biological nature/the ecosphere — represents the alienated condition of those in thrall to the power and logic of capital, even the white people who created this system. Indeed, in the context of capitalist society, the subjugation, exploitation and destruction of the natural world and the subjugation, exploitation, and destruction of human beings go hand-in-hand.

In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that within the framework of “Enlightenment” epistemology (whose cynical, instrumental “rationality” reaches its apogee in capitalist modernity), “[w]hat [humans] want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other [humans]. That is its only aim” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4). They add a few pages later,

[m]yth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. [Humans] pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards [people]. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9)

Metabolic rift

The discussion of the alienating quality of capitalist society (in the forms of alienating labour and production, as well as alienation of society and individuals from nature) leads to another of Marx’s concepts, one that is directly relevant to ecology — the idea of the metabolic rift.

Marxist sociologist John Bellamy Foster contends that within the field of social science, “the most important critical insights this century have arguably emerged from ecosocialism” and that “[a]t the root of this critical understanding of the ecological problem is Marx’s famous theory of the metabolic rift, focusing on capitalism’s alienated social metabolism” (Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution, 26-7).

Foster writes in an earlier journal article,

The key to Marx’s entire theoretical approach in this area is the concept of social ecological metabolism (Stoffwechsel), which was rooted in his understanding of the labor process. Defining the labor process in general (as opposed to its historically specific manifestations), Marx employed the concept of metabolism to describe the human relation to nature through labor:

“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. . . . It [the labor process] is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence...” (“Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology”, 380)

However, with the emergence of capitalism, a “rift” developed in the metabolic interactions between society and nature, because capitalism takes and takes and takes from nature without giving back or replenishing it. Foster elucidates this by drawing on volumes 1 and 3 of Marx’s Capital,

the central theoretical construct is that of a “rift” in the “metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” or in the “social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life,” through the removal from the soil of its constituent elements, requiring its “systematic restoration.” This contradiction is associated with the growth simultaneously of large scale industry and large-scale agriculture under capitalism, with the former providing agriculture with the means of the intensive exploitation of the soil. (“Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 379-80)

In Marx’s own words,

All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility… Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker. (quoted in Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 379)

As we are well aware today, such degradation of the soil is just one of many examples of the environmental crises and the metabolic rift that capitalism creates. There is also, as Foster points out, climate change,

ocean acidification, loss of biological diversity, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, disappearance of fresh water, land cover change (particularly deforestation), and growing pollution from synthetic chemicals (leading to biomagnification and bioaccumulation of toxins in living organisms) (Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 65).

Capitalism is the problem

Despite what liberals and capitalist ideologues argue (whether sincerely or disingenuously), capitalism does not have the capacity to adequately combat the ecological problems that it causes. It is an inherently unsustainable and wasteful system because it must always seek new avenues of profit generation and economic growth — otherwise it ceases functioning. The endless creation and accumulation of wealth for the sake of wealth is the essence of capitalism.

This requires the ever increasing exploitation of land and resources and the expanding proliferation of junk commodities that no one really needs, resulting in huge waste and pollution. As Marx says with such eloquent disdain in the Grundrisse,

workers, indeed, are productive, as far as they increase the capital of their master; unproductive as to the material result of their labour. In fact, of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk (Grundrisse, 202).

This is because the use values of the products of labour are completely secondary to their exchange value in the wacky world of capitalism. In other words, things are made primarily to be sold in order to make money, regardless of how useful or necessary they are in themselves, and irrespective of the human and ecological consequences. Following Marx, others realised that the capitalist

system increasingly demanded, simply to keep going under conditions of chronic overaccumulation, the production of negative use values and the non-fulfillment of human needs. This entails the absolute alienation of the labor process, that is, the metabolic relations between human beings and nature, turning it primarily into a form of waste” (Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 58-9, emphasis in original).

We must therefore reject the notion that reforming capitalism or that technological advancements alone can solve the ecological disasters that beset us — indeed that are inflicted upon us and the world by capitalism. Of course, technology is essential to the metabolic relation of human beings to nature,

but technology as conditioned by both social relations and natural conditions. Contrary to those who argue that Marx wore an ecological blinder when it came to envisioning the limitations of technology in surmounting ecological problems, he explicitly argued in his critique of capitalist agriculture, that while capitalism served to promote “technical development in agriculture,” it also brought into being social relations that were “incompatible” with a sustainable agriculture... The solution thus lay less in the application of a given technology than in the transformation of social relations. (Foster, “Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 390)

Contrary to what the techno-utopians and other apologists for capitalism believe, what is needed is qualitative, revolutionary social transformation. However, to quote Foster again,

there is simply no indication anywhere in Marx’s writings that he believed that a sustainable relation to the earth would come automatically with the transition to socialism. Rather, he emphasized the need for planning in this area, including such measures as the elimination of the antagonism between town and country through the more even dispersal of the population ... and the restoration and improvement of the soil through the recycling of soil nutrients. All of this demanded a radical transformation in the human relation to the earth via changed production relations. (“Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 386)

Ecosocialism is the solution

Although socialism will not be sufficient in and of itself, it is certainly necessary for a sustainable world. What is required, then, is not just socialism but ecosocialism. In the face of the multifaceted, compounding environmental catastrophe confronting humanity as a result of capitalism,

what is needed is a decades-long ecological revolution, in which an emergent humanity will once again, as it has innumerable times before, reinvent itself, transforming its existing relations of production and the entire realm of social existence, in order to generate a restored metabolism with nature and a whole new world of substantive equality as the key to sustainable human development. This is the peculiar “challenge and burden of our historical time.” (Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 125)

The aim is to build a system in which

socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their own collective control rather than being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature (Marx, quoted in Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 382).

According to Foster, the emergence of an “environmental proletariat” is central to the struggle to overcome capitalism and construct ecosocialism. He claims we can

expect the most radical movements to emerge precisely where economic and ecological crises converge on the lives of the underlying population. Given the nature of capitalism and imperialism and the exigencies of the global environmental crisis, a new, revolutionary environmental proletariat is likely to arise most powerfully and most decisively in the Global South. Yet, such developments, it is now clear, will not be confined to any one part of the planet. (Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 124-5).

Those of us in the Global North/imperial core (of which so-called Australia is a member) bear the responsibility of putting our shoulders to the wheel and playing a part in the struggle of the international environmental proletariat, not least of all because of our disproportionate wastefulness, carbon footprint and overconsumption. 

These come at the expense of the Global South/periphery through the hyperexploitation of its labour power and resources, and because the poorest areas of the world are bearing, and will increasingly bear, the brunt of various ecological disasters that the Global North is primarily responsible for.

Foster rightly asserts, “In the dire conditions of the Anthropocene epoch, there is no answer for the human world that does not address the triple threats of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism” (Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 492). But the richer countries are not insulated from these crises either, so it is also in our own direct self-interest to fight for ecosocialism.

What humanity stands to achieve, among other things, is the overcoming of alienation both within society and between civilisation and nature. Social and technological advances, in conjunction, would enable us to come into a more harmonious relationship with the wider world around us, with which we are inextricably entwined, while also protecting human beings from the deadly whims of nature to an extent that no other social formation has hitherto been able to. 

In other words, and at the risk of sounding overly utopian, the human subject will be reconciled with the natural object. For the very first time in homo sapiens’ time on Earth, we will be truly free, in control of our collective destiny, and at home in the world.

In his monumental three-volume magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the theorist of hope and utopia par excellence, argues for the potential of reaching a historical condition in which the “naturalisation of man” and “the humanisation of nature” is attained through a reciprocal, dialectical process — an idea he borrows from Marx (The Principle of Hope, 205). Bloch’s concludes his book with the following sublime and inspiring words:

… man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e., grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland. (The Principle of Hope, 1375-6, emphasis in original)