PAKISTAN

Price of peace

Muhammad Amir Rana 

Published June 9, 2024 

DAWN

PAKISTAN is not alone in confronting armed opposition. Many nations grapple with persistent violence, often resorting to force over peace negotiations. This hesitation stems from the fear of concessions, neglecting the heavy price paid for prolonged conflict.

Colombia offers a compelling example. In 2016, it opted for peace, establishing a ceasefire with major rebel groups — primarily factions of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which has been active since 1964. Despite initial setbacks, Colombia recently enacted a Total Peace Bill to forge agreements with remaining armed groups.

Colombia’s peace process has been arduous, with the government determined to achieve an end to the conflict, even if it necessitates meeting some of the armed groups’ demands. This dilemma resonates with states facing insurgencies, who fear internationalising their conflicts. While Colombia’s UN involvement, prompted by resistance demands, ultimately aided negotiations, core issues like land reform, victim justice, and political participation remain unresolved.

The success stories of other peace processes offer valuable lessons. Notably, many successful agreements involved compromises across the ta­­b­le. In some cases, these have caused major amendments in social contracts of the states, the autonomy of a region, the separation of a territory, or agreement on resource distribution. The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 in Northern Ireland helped end the violent conflict known as ‘The Troubles’, leading to power-sharing in the North­ern Ireland Assembly and disarmament of paramilitary groups.

Colombians took 50 years to assess the strength of the resistance movement.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 ended the Second Sudanese Civil War, granted southern Sudan autonomy, and led to a referendum in 2011, after which South Sudan gained independence.

The Peace Accords (1996) in Guatemala ended 36 years of civil war, leading to the demobilisation and integration of guerrilla fighters into society, and significant political reforms. The Mindanao Peace Process (2014) in the Philippines and the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro established the Bangsamoro Autono­mous Region, granting greater autonomy and addressing the grievances of the Moro people.

Finally, the Final Agreement (2016) between the Colombian government and the FARC was signed. The agreement ended over 50 years of armed conflict. These peace processes typically involved lengthy negotiations, international mediation, and the establishment of frameworks for disarmament, political integration, and socioeconomic development to address the root causes of the conflicts.

A multifaceted armed resistance stretched out for 50 years in Colombia because it had roots in socioeconomic factors, took time to pick momentum, and once it picked momentum, it became more lethal compared with movements triggered by religion and ideologies. A mix of socioecono­mic, political, and ideological factors can nurture a separatist solid resistance against the states. The FARC emerged as a response to deep-rooted social and economic inequalities in rural Colombia. Vast land ownership disparities and peasant communities’ marginalisation provided fertile ground for the group’s initial support and recruitment.

Colombians took 50 years just to assess the strength of the resistance movement, which resu­l­ted in thousands of deaths, political instability, a poor economy, and a constant state of fear. Un­­governed and poorly governed spaces have always provided fertile ground for resistance movements, and Colombia was no different in this respect.

A similar situation was witnessed in the Fed­e­rally Administrative Tribal Areas — now the New­ly Merged Tribal Districts — where the state is still facing armed and unarmed resistance aga­inst its approach to governing these areas. The banned TTP wants to revoke the status of these areas to regain the strength it enjoyed before the military operations and under tribal arrangements.

Balochistan is facing the worst governance crisis; a hybrid governance system has failed to stop the power elites’ misuse of the province’s resources. It cannot deliver services to the people and needs help to conceive a development plan. The securitisation of the province fuels anger among the people, including those who have experienced urban life in other parts of the country.

A comparison between the Baloch and FARC armed resistance can be drawn as both movements are deeply rooted in socioeconomic disparities. An­­oth­er common feature that creates a conducive environment for the armed resistance movement lies in the structure of the parallel economies in the areas, which include illicit trade, smuggling, drug trafficking, etc. Both state and non-state actors become the beneficiaries of this parallel ec­­o­­nomy. The resolution of the problem can hurt their economic benefits, and they resist any attempt at this.

In Colombia, the FARC survived so long because of parallel economic structures, which significantly funded its operations through the cultivation, production, and trafficking of cocaine. Kidnapping for ransom and extortion of local businesses and individuals were also significant sources of income for the FARC, further sustaining the resistance.

Two factors that the state emphasises are regional dynamics and external support for the armed resistance. These are essential factors, but to deal with armed resistance, it must concentrate on other aspects too. For instance, the state underestimates the armed group’s ability to adapt its tactics and strategy to changing circumstances, as well as the local support network it has built up over time.

There is nothing new about the dynamics of armed resistance — a vast amount of literature is available on the subject. However, the peace process is challenging. First, realising that the chain of violence cannot be broken without a dialogue takes time, as the state evaluates strength in terms of resources, and not in terms of the local support that is available to resistance movements. The ceasefire between the Colombian government and FARC dissidents has been mixed, with both positive outcomes and significant challenges. However, spoilers continue to provoke both the state and non-state actors, which causes violations of agreements and inconsistencies in the implementation of peace agreements, often extending the peace process.

While a good takeaway from the Colombian peace process is that it has not caused the country’s disintegration, it is also true that had the peace process been started 40 years ago, the results would not have been very different. The state took 50 years just to prove it is strong, but real strength comes through dialogue.

The writer is a security analyst.

Published in Dawn, June 9th, 2024

Chinese advice

Muhammad Amir Rana 

PAKISTAN’S law-enforcement agencies have completed the investigation of the Dasu terrorist attack carried out against Chinese nationals in March, in record time.

This is, indeed, a remarkable achievement, but it does not seem to have impressed the Chinese authorities very much, as there have been reports that Beijing wants a large-scale anti-terrorism operation, like Zarb-i-Azb, against the militants.

On March 26, a convoy of Chinese nationals travelling from Islamabad to the Dasu Hydropower Project site in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kohistan district was attacked by Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorists. The government announced compensation of $2.5 million for the families of the five Chinese nationals who lost their lives in the attack. A joint investigation team comprising police and intelligence agencies’ personnel was immediately formed to address Chinese concerns regarding the capability of Pakistani law enforcers to probe a high-profile terrorist attack.

The reports of China’s demand for a massive counterterrorism operation are reflective of Beijing’s concerns over the escalating threats to Chinese nationals working on CPEC-related and other projects in this country. Pakistan has a history of launching such counterterrorism operations at the request of China. The Lal Masjid operation in Islamabad in 2007 was launched after Chinese President Hu Jintao called Gen Musharraf. Prior to the operation, women students of the Jamia Hafsa madressah had kidnapped Chinese health workers who they believed were commercial sex workers.

One can take precautionary steps against terrorist groups, but what about intolerance?

International pressure, including from the Chinese, also worked in 2014 when the Pakistan military launched Operation Zarb-i-Azb in North Waziristan. China fully supported the Financial Action Task Force’s recommendation that Pakistan comply with its counterterrorism financing and anti-money laundering commitments. The maximum favour the Chinese officials extended to Pakistan in this case was to support the country’s need for more time to fulfil the financial watchdog’s requirements.

However, China’s latest demand regarding a large-scale operation does not seem feasible, as the TTP and its affiliates are hiding in Afghanistan, and cross-border operations would trigger a major conflict in the region. Moreover, there is also the Baloch insurgency, which is a complex issue that needs to be handled delicately. There is already an ongoing encounter between the insurgents and security forces in Balochistan. Any misadventure is likely to incur heavy political and security costs.

Pakistan’s economy is in the throes of a deep crisis, and a massive military operation would entail its own costs. At the same time, it seems that the Pakistani leadership is underestimating the demands of its friends for a fully secure environment for their investment. This is not only about China, a major investor in Pakistan, but also other friends of the country, such as Saudi Arabia, which have concerns similar to Beijing’s when it comes to putting their money here. These states are taking security concerns very seriously.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently approved a cooperation agreement between the Presidency of State Security in the kingdom and the military intelligence in Pakistan to combat terrorism and its financing. The Pakistani leadership appears overly confident in its assessment that the security challenges at home can be mitigated as before; it wants the states that are looking at investment prospects in the country to trust its capabilities. However, terrorist incidents such as the Dasu attack will only shake the confidence of foreign investors.

No doubt, the Taliban’s Afghanistan has emerged as a major security challenge for the country, but terrorism and extremism have a long history of state institutions using them as tools for political and strategic purposes. One can be aware of the dynamics of terrorist groups and take precautions, but what about intolerance, which can erupt suddenly and result in the lynching of innocent people?

The state has fanned the flames of intolerance in society, and this has eroded the social fabric and made conditions insecure for the minorities and for those who think differently from the state. Intolerance has become a huge hurdle in the way of economic progress, including foreign investment. How will the Chinese forget the incident last year when one of their nationals barely escaped lynching by a mob at the Dasu Hydropower Project site? The Chinese official was simply asking employees to complete their work before going for prayers.

Security firms dealing in risk assessment most often cite the killing of Priyantha Kumara Diyawadana, a Sri Lankan national lynched by a mob on Dec 3, 2021, in Sialkot, to show who controls the environment for investment.

If you were to ask a Pakistani official or leader, they would claim that Pakistanis are moderate in their views and the most tolerant society among Muslim nations. Such a claim was recently made in Beijing. Lynching incidents are dismissed as the actions of a few misguided and emotional youths.

However, defending the indefensible causes more damage and shakes even friendly countries’ confidence in one’s ability to maintain security. The truth is that Pakistan’s social indicators are amongst the poorest anywhere. A major reason for this is substandard education and an extensive network of religious institutions that nurture extremism and intolerance in the country. The establishment has not stopped considering the political utility of religious institutions either.

Extremism and intolerance are thriving with state support, as the power elites are not willing to review their connection with the clergy. Making policies to counter extremism and terrorism satisfies their conscience, and they believe that by simply placing policy drafts in the cupboards of the relevant ministries, they will automatically solve the issue. The maximum effort by the state to solve the problem has been to create institutions to counter extremism. Eventually, these institutions are used to appease the clergy.

China goes by its own model to forcefully ‘harmonise’ its ethnic and religious communities. However, for Pakistan, the first and foremost priority must be to abandon its approach of pacifying the sentiments of the hardliners, and instead, stand with the weak and the victims, regardless of their religion or community.

The writer is a security analyst.

Published in Dawn, June 2nd, 2024

From refugee camps to World Cup glory: Inspiring journey of Afghanistan cricket

June 05, 2024 
By Jafar Haand
Matiullah Abid Noor

Afghanistan'’s Karim Sadiq dives to catch the ball while fielding during the Asia Cup one-day international cricket tournament against Pakistan in Fatullah, near Dhaka, Bangladesh, Feb. 27, 2014.

WASHINGTON —

When the parents of Karim Sadiq and Taj Maluk fled a wrecked Afghanistan torn apart by the 1979 Soviet invasion and infighting warlords, they didn’t imagine their children — Karim and Taj — would return to reunite the war-torn nation through cricket.

Taj Maluk became the first coach of the Afghan national team. Fans refer to him as one of the founding fathers of Afghan cricket. Younger brother Karim Sadiq played a key role in Afghanistan’s qualification in the World Cup in 2010, creating history for the cricket-loving nation of more than 40 million.

The brothers were brought up in a refugee camp called Katcha Garhi, in Peshawar, Pakistan. The family left a decent life in the eastern Nangarhar province to live in a sea of mud houses and poverty.

“Life was all struggle those days,” Karim Sadiq recalls. “Doing odd jobs in the night and playing cricket in the daytime. We used a stick as a bat, used to make plastic balls from plastic waste material.”

There was an old black-and-white TV set in their refugee camp where the young and elders watched international matches, including Pakistan winning the 1992 World Cup. These events had a huge influence on aspiring cricketers in Afghan refugee camps.

Afghan national cricket team coach, Taj Maluk, speaks to his team in Kabul, May 27, 2006.

The elder brother, Taj Maluk, searched for talent in refugee camps and founded the Afghan Cricket Club, which arguably laid the foundation of the future Afghanistan team.

Another Afghan cricketer, Allah Dad Noori, also played a key role by pioneering a path for cricket in Afghanistan.

Like the brothers, many international Afghan players, such as Mohammad Shehzad, Raees Ahmadzai, Mohammad Nabi, and the country’s first global star Rashid Khan, now captain, all grew up learning cricket and becoming cricketers in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Gujarat Titans' Rashid Khan plays a shot during the Indian Premier League cricket match between Delhi Capitals and Gujarat Titans in New Delhi, India, April 24, 2024.

“It was our passion. We didn't know then that Cricket would bring such happiness to the Afghan nation,” Karim Sadiq told VOA. “Cricket conveys a message that Afghanistan is not a country of war and drugs. It's a country of love and sports.”

In 2001, after the invasion of the U.S. forces against the Taliban rule, cricket flourished in Afghanistan, which became an associate member of the ICC, the world’s cricketing body.

A new younger generation of cricketers emerged. Now, Afghanistan is a full member of the ICC’s elite club of 12 countries, and it enjoys the status of a test-playing nation.

The Afghan team won many hearts in the 2023 World Cup after earning wins against the former world champions — Pakistan, England and Sri Lanka.

“Afghan players fight for every match as they are fighting for the nation,” Pakistan’s former captain, Rashid Latif, who coached Afghanistan, told VOA. “T20 cricket needs aggression and Afghanistan players have it. They are capable of surprises in the World Cup.”

Now, Afghanistan is playing in the T20 Cricket World Cup co-hosted by the United States and West Indies. It has strong contenders like New Zealand and West Indies in the group, along with minnows Papa New Guinea and Uganda. Some experts call it the “Group of Death” because only two teams will make it through the knockout stage.

A sign advertises the Cricket World Cup matches in East Meadow, New York, May 8, 2024.

The Taliban banned all women's sports and put restrictions on some men’s sports, but not cricket. There is speculation it’s because they enjoyed the game themselves or were apprehensive about the possible public reaction if they banned it, given its massive popularity.

A few weeks ago, when Afghanistan’s team captain, Rashid Khan, visited Afghanistan to meet family and friends, Taliban officials presented him with bouquets and took selfies with the superstar.

Rashid and his team members, including young superstars — batters Rehmanullah Gurbaz and Ibrahim Zadran, allrounder Azmatullah Omarzai, spinners Mujeeb-ur Rehman and Noor Ahmed — have arrived in the West Indies, as have their diehard supporters from Europe, Canada and the U.S.

Back in Afghanistan, Karim Sadiq is now working to promote the sport, while his elder brother, 49-year-old Taj Maluk, has turned to religion. “Cricket is not just a game. It reunites Afghans and brings joy to the lives of people,” Taj Maluk told VOA. “We will pray for their success.”

Karim Sadiq recalls when Afghanistan qualified for the T20 World Cup in 2010. “When we returned home, it was a festival. Everywhere, celebrating crowds held up the Afghan flag. We all wish to see such festivity again, to see Afghanistan become the World Champion.”

Across Afghanistan, fans have made special arrangements to view the matches. Some have pooled their money to buy dish antennas. Others have decorated the hujras, or living rooms, with national flags.

“Afghanistan is a wounded land. Cricket helps people stitch those wounds,“ said Shams ul Rahman Shirzad, a cricket fan in Nangarhar, from where the brothers Taj Maluk and Karim Sadiq hailed and once dreamed of having a national cricket team.

This story originated in VOA’s Afghan service.

More difficult now

SUSTAINING hegemony over the masses

Dr Niaz Murtaza 

DAWN 

Published May 28, 2024 Updated a day ago

SUSTAINING hegemony over the masses has been a key aim and challenge for our elitist state. This exercise has caused endless political instability and insecurity, given the fightback by the people and the power tussles among elite ethnicities, classes and institutions.

The top gun position shifted often in the first decade: institutionally from the Muslim League to the bureaucracy, to the military; ethnically from Mohajirs to Punjabis; and from a mixed class clique to the middle class. The coordinates of raw power soon became conservative, older, male, military, elitist, Sunni, upper class and Punjab.

Since 1958, the unelected clique has kept its hegemony via close ties with global patrons, co-opting political and state elites, rigging politics and demolishing mass dissent, with religion and Kashmir as rallying narratives. It ruled unelected via large one-window but odious US aid: money, arms, veto cover, markets, technology, and multilateral loans. Linked to US security aims, it helped keep politicians out but caused violence too.

As US aid ebbed, it courted politicians to quell dissent and ruled covertly. The elected eras kept growing given the growing internal and external binds against autocracy. The first was from 1972 to 1977 with one (free) election. The second was from 1985 to 1999 with only one of five elections deemed fair (1988) and each assembly nixed early. The third is from 2002 to now, with two free elections (2008 and 2013) out of five. Four assemblies reached term but not the prime ministers, reflecting minor democratic gains. The early dismissals were due to civilian forays into what the establishment considered its own affairs, policy tiffs and claimed misrule. They were carried out via coups, no-trust votes, presidential powers, and forced exits. The mode and strength of covert rule varied, focusing on security and external policy from 2008-18 but more intrusively politics and economics as well after 2018, erasing all democratic gains. Both eras saw big tiffs with out-of-sync civilians, with Nawaz Sharif to the establishment’s left and Imran Khan to its right on the US, India, Taliban, etc.

State elements now face a unique challenge in sustaining their hegemony.

State elements now face a unique challenge in sustaining their hegemony. Cosy ties with the US are over and other powers (China and Saudi Arabia) can’t provide large, one-window aid. Arch-enemy India is now a global power and dwarfs our geo-economic powers. Global sanctions have cut the ability to deploy jihadis. State elements have partially lost their narrative as the custodians of national piety and patriotism as Imran Khan acts as a stauncher custodian. There are hostile extremist states on three sides matching our insurgencies in KP and Balochistan. The economy is unusually bad. Yet its residual powers are formidable — arms, agents, businesses — and keep all parties subservient.

The divorce with the PTI has created an elite middle-class alliance against older parties: middle-class parties (led by the PTI), media anchors, professional classes, expats and sections of the judiciary, bureaucracy, and reportedly even the ranks. Moreover, the insurgents are largely middle class. Smaller middle-class parties had existed for long, like religious ones and the MQM. But the advent of social media has aided the rise of a pan-Pakistan middle-class party popular in all core regions: upper Punjab, Peshawar valley and Karachi and even beyond. But this party’s governance and democratic records are poor too, like the older elite parties.

These trends are forcing elements of the state to resort to desperate ways of retaining its hege­mony as its options dwindle: mutually conflicting ties with multiple global pat­rons to scavenge various bits of key aid, new docile ele­cted allies, cruder rigging and gagg­ing, not too covert co-governance in more domains and using force even in core regions against dissident ex-middle-class allies. Even so, this hybrid set-up remains divided and inept and may not survive, let alone thrive. What options will unelected forces use if they fail? More force, overt rule or technocracy? But these won’t succeed and will, in fact, upend critical Western support. So, good governance eludes all elite factions. Governance can only improve by nixing elite politics for organic pro-poor politics.

Can society tame this unelected being? It may need a joint effort to overpower the flailing behemoth. So, we enter a new phase of high turbulence: economic volatility, political instability, and high insecurity. Passengers must fasten their seat belts, if they have one, as the captain won’t turn on the signs.

The writer is a political economist with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
murtazaniaz@yahoo.com
X: @NiazMurtaza2

Published in Dawn, May 28th, 2024

Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today

BY ASHLEY SMITH -   MAY 29, 2024

 MAY 29, 2024

Image by Zyanya Citlalli.

LONG READ

Capitalism produces imperialism—the competition between the great powers and their corporations for the division and redivision of the world market. This competition generates a dynamic hierarchy of states, with the most powerful at the top, middling or sub-imperial powers beneath them, and oppressed nations at the bottom.

No hierarchy is permanent. Capitalism’s law of uneven and combined development, its booms and busts, its corporate competition, its interstate conflict, and its uprisings by the exploited and oppressed destabilize and restructure the state system.

As a result, the history of imperialism has had a sequence of orders. A multipolar one characterized the period from the late 19th century to 1945. It produced the great colonial empires and two world wars. It was supplanted by a bipolar order from 1945 and 1991, with the United States and Soviet Union struggling for hegemony over the newly independent states liberated from colonial rule.

With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United States oversaw a unipolar order of neoliberal globalization, faced no superpower rival, and fought a series of wars to enforce its so-called rules based order of global capitalism from 1991 through the early 2000s. That order ended with the relative decline of the United States, the rise of China, and the resurrection of Russia, ushering in today’s asymmetric multipolar order.

The United States remains the dominant power, but it is now locked in competition with China and Russia, above increasingly assertive sub-imperial states such as Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil, as well as subject nations that suffer both political and economic oppression. Faced with a looming epoch of crisis, wars, and revolts, the global Left must build international solidarity from below among workers and the oppressed in a struggle against imperialism and for socialism throughout the world.

Global capitalism’s multiple crises

Global capitalism has produced multiple intersecting crises that are intensifying conflict between and within states. These crises are a global economic slump; sharpening interimperial rivalry between the United States, China, and Russia; climate change; unprecedented global migration; and pandemics, of which COVID-19 is only the most recent example. These crises have undermined the political establishment, caused political polarization in most countries of the world, opening the door to the Right and the Left, and triggering waves of explosive yet episodic struggles from below. We have not witnessed such a period of crisis, conflict, wars, political instability, and revolts in decades.

All of this is a challenge and an opportunity for an international Left and workers’ movement still suffering from the consequence of several decades of defeat and retreat. It is also an opening to a new far right that offers authoritarian solutions promising to restore social order by scapegoating the oppressed at home and whipping up reactionary forms of nationalism against enemies abroad.

Once in power this new far right has failed to overcome any of global capitalism’s crises and inequalities but has exacerbated them. As a result, neither the establishment nor its far right opponents offer any way out of our epoch of catastrophe.

The asymmetric multipolar world order

Amid these metastasizing crises, the United States no longer stands atop a unipolar world order. It has suffered relative decline as a result of the long neoliberal boom, its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Great Recession. Those developments have enabled the rise of China as a new imperial power and Russia’s resurgence as a nuclear-armed petro-power. At the same time, a host of sub-imperial powers have become more assertive than in the past, playing the great powers off one another, and jockeying for advantage in their region.

All of this has created today’s asymmetric multipolar world order. The United States remains the world’s most powerful state, in possession of the biggest economy, the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, with the most powerful military, largest network of alliances, and therefore greatest geopolitical power. But it faces imperial rivals in China and Russia and sub-imperial ones in every region of the globe.

These antagonisms have not led to coherent geopolitical and economic blocs. Globalization has bound most of the economies of the world tightly together, preventing the return of blocs like the ones during the Cold War.

Thus, the two biggest rivals, the United States and China, are also two of the most integrated in the world. Think of Apple’s iPhone—designed in California, manufactured in Taiwanese-owned factories in China, and exported to vendors in the United States and throughout the world.

The new sub-imperial powers are not loyal either to China or the United States, but opportunistically forge pacts with one or the other power in pursuit of their own capitalist interests. For example, while India strikes deals with China in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) alliance against the United States, it participates in Washington’s QUAD alliance (United States, Australia, India, Japan) against China.

That said, the global economic slump, the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China, and especially Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine and US/NATO sanctions against Moscow are beginning to pry apart globalization as we have known it. Indeed, globalization has plateaued and begun to decline.

For example, through the so-called Chip War, the United States and China are segregating the top end of their high tech economies. In another, Western sanctions against Russia over its imperialist war on Ukraine have excluded it from U.S. and European Union (EU) trade and investment, forcing it to turn to markets in China and Iran.

As a result, we are on a trajectory toward increasing economic division, geopolitical rivalry, and even military conflict between the United States, China, and Russia, as well between them and sub-imperial powers. At the same time, the deep economic integration of especially the United States and China, as well as the fact that each possesses nuclear weapons, counteracts the tendency toward open war, which would risk mutually assured destruction and global economic collapse.

Washington rearms for great power rivalry

Since the Obama administration, the U.S. state has been trying to develop a new strategy to counter the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia. Obama announced his so-called Pivot to Asia and Trump openly placed great power rivalry with Beijing and Moscow at the center of his National Security Strategy, but neither developed a comprehensive approach to these conflicts or others in the new asymmetric multipolar world order.

President Barack Obama remained preoccupied with the Middle East, wrapping up the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and then shoring up the region’s existing order after the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS. Trump proclaimed his strategy for great power rivalry, but it was incoherent in practice. It included a chaotic mix of far right nationalism, protectionism, threats to abandon historic alliances like NATO, and transactional bilateral deals with both designated rivals and traditional allies. His erratic years of misrule led to the further relative decline of the United States.

President Joe Biden has developed the most coherent strategy to date. He hoped to co-opt class and social struggles with minor reforms, implement a new industrial policy to ensure U.S. competitiveness in high tech manufacturing, and rehabilitate Washington’s alliances like NATO and expand them through launching a so-called League of Democracies against Washington’s autocratic rivals.

In the end, centrist Democrats, Republicans, and the courts blocked many of his reforms designed to ameliorate social inequality. But he succeeded in implementing his industrial policy through multiple bills. Biden also has begun to refurbish and expand U.S. alliances through new pacts and economic initiatives. The goal of all this is to contain China, deter Russian expansionism in Eastern Europe, and pull as many sub-imperial powers, subordinate states, and oppressed nations back under U.S. hegemony and its preferred international order.

Biden has continued his predecessors’ attempt to extract the United States from its failed occupations. He finally ended Washington’s twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan in shambolic style, committing war crimes in the process and abandoning the country to the Taliban. He then tried to stabilize the Middle East by continuing Trump’s Abraham Accords and further efforts to normalize Israel by establishing formal relations between the Arab regimes with Tel Aviv. Of course, this gave the greenlight to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue the siege on Gaza, the settler expansion in the occupied West Bank, and the deepening of apartheid within Israel, now given horrific expression in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. In Europe, Biden recommitted the United States to NATO, sending a signal to Russia that Washington, not Moscow, would remain the predominant hegemon in the region.

But the main target of Biden’s strategy for great power rivalry is China. On the economic front, his industrial policy is designed to restore, protect, and expand U.S. economic supremacy against Beijing, especially in high tech. It aims to onshore or friend shore high tech manufacturing, impose a high fence of protectionism around U.S. design and engineering of computer chips, and fund U.S. high tech companies and universities in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields to lock its dominance in AI (Artificial Intelligence) and other cutting-edge tech, especially because of their military applications.

On the geopolitical front, Biden has consolidated existing alliances with Japan and expanded them to include especially those antagonized by China, including Vietnam and the Philippines. He also reiterated the One China policy that recognizes only Beijing and the policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan, which commits the United States to arming the island nation like a “porcupine” to deter Chinese aggression but remains vague about whether it would come to the island’s defense in the event of an attack or invasion.

On the military front, Biden doubled down on U.S. military alliances such as the QUAD and the Five Eyes (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States), and established new ones, notably the deal between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (AUKUS) for the deployment of nuclear submarines in Australia.  Washington is in the process triggering an arms and base building race with China throughout the Asia Pacific.

Washington’s imperialist rivals: China and Russia

China and Russia have implemented their own strategy to project their imperial ambitions. These three powers form what Gilbert Achcar has called the “strategic triad” of world imperialism.

Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has aimed to restore its standing as a great power in global capitalism. It has implemented an economic strategy to leap up the value chain to compete at the highest level of design, engineering, and manufacturing. It has funded both state and private capital through programs such as China 2025, which aims to establish select corporations as national champions in high tech.

This has been highly successful with Huawei and BYD among others establishing themselves as global competitors. China is now an industry leader in whole fields such as solar energy and electric vehicles, challenging U.S., European, and Japanese capital.

With its massive economic expansion, China has tried to export its surplus capital and capacity abroad through its $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a vast plan for infrastructure development throughout the world, especially in the Global South. None of this is altruistic. Most of this investment is designed to construct infrastructure, rails, roads, and ports to export raw materials to China. China then exports its finished products back to those countries in a classic imperialist pattern. But a combination of its slowing economy, banking troubles, and debt crises in countries it had loaned to has led China to retreat from its grandest ambitions for BRI.

Nevertheless, China is trying parlay this investment into geopolitical influence through economic formations like the BRICS, as well as political/security pacts like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (including China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, and a host of Central Asian states). It has also asserted its influence in the Middle East by encouraging normalization of diplomatic relations between its ally Iran and Saudi Arabia, which it depends on for the bulk of its oil.

To back its newfound economic clout with military might, China is modernizing its armed forces, especially its navy, specifically to challenge U.S. naval hegemony in the Pacific. As part of that, it has seized islands claimed by other states, creating antagonisms with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and many others. It has militarized some of these, especially in the South China Sea, to project its power, protect shipping routes, and assert rights to undersea oil and natural gas reserves.

Finally, Beijing is enforcing historic claims to what it considers its national territory as part of a project of national rejuvenation. Thus, it has imposed its dominion over Hong Kong with brute force, carried out its own war on terror and cultural genocide against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and escalated threats of invasion of Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province.

Under Vladimir Putin’s rule, meanwhile, the Russian ruling class has aimed to restore its imperial power, so devastatingly undermined by the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe and its disastrous implementation of neoliberal shock therapy. It has watched the United States and European imperialism gobble up its former sphere of influence through the expansion of NATO and the EU.

Putin rebuilt Russia as a nuclear armed petro-power with the aim of reclaiming its former empire in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, while imposing order domestically against any popular dissent and especially against its sometimes recalcitrant republics. It has tried to consolidate its hold over its former sphere of influence through collaboration with China in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

That imperialist project has led it to launch a succession of wars in Chechnya (1996, 1999), Georgia (2008), and Ukraine (2014, 2022–) as well as interventions in Syria and several African countries. Russia’s imperial assertion has precipitated resistance from states and peoples it has targeted and also imperialist counter-offensives from the United States, NATO, and the EU.

Russian imperialist war on Ukraine

Three strategic flashpoints have brought these interimperial rivalries to a head—Ukraine, Gaza, and Taiwan.

Ukraine became the site of a major war in Europe for the first time since World War II. Russia invaded the country in 2014 and then again in 2022 in a clear act of imperialist aggression, attempting to seize the entire country and impose a semicolonial regime on it. Putin justified this with lies about de-Nazification (hardly believable from one of the most reactionary states in the world and an ally of the far right internationally).

Of course, its aggression was in part in response to U.S., NATO, and EU expansion, but that does not make its war any less imperialist in nature. It aimed to use the conquest of Ukraine as a stepping stone to reclaim its former sphere of influence in the rest of Eastern Europe.

The Ukrainian state, military, and people rose up against the invasion in a fight for national self-determination.

Biden has supplied Ukraine with economic and military aid for Washington’s own imperial reasons. It is no ally of national liberation struggles, as its long history of imperialist wars from the Philippines to Vietnam and Iraq attests. Washington has aimed to weaken Russia, prevent its encroachment on its expanded sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and wield its NATO allies together against, not only Moscow, but also China, which NATO has designated as a strategic focus for the first time in its history.

The United States and its NATO allies imposed the most severe sanctions in history on Russia and pressured Western Europe to wean itself off Russian energy supplies and instead rely on U.S. natural gas exports. Russia in reaction has become increasingly dependent on China for trade and tech, as well as North Korea and Iran for missiles, drones, and other military hardware.

Washington also tried to use Russia’s aggression to gather the Global South under its rubric. But it has not had much luck with the governments of those states, despite popular identification of most of these formerly colonized countries with Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination. Nonetheless, Biden used Ukraine to shore up Washington’s global alliances and soft power as it postured as the defender of self-determination and its so-called rules based order against Russian imperialism.

Israel’s U.S.-backed genocidal war in Gaza

Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has upset Washington’s imperial plans for the entire Middle East and precipitated its biggest geopolitical crisis since Vietnam. Faced with slow strangulation by the total siege in Gaza, Hamas led a desperate jailbreak on October 7, seized hostages, and killed large numbers of soldiers and civilians.

Its attack exposed the weaknesses of Israeli intelligence and border control over its apartheid wall. In response, Israel launched its biggest military incursion into Gaza with the stated aim of retrieving the hostages and destroying Hamas. It has succeeded in neither. Instead, it has laid waste to Gaza in a war of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The Biden administration has supported this every step of the way, funding it, providing it political cover with vetoes in the United Nations, and arming it to the teeth.

But there is a schism between the United States and Israel. While Washington supports Israel’s goal of destroying the Palestinian resistance, it has tried to cajole Israel into shifting its strategy from carpet bombing Gaza and killing civilians to special operations to target Hamas. The Biden administration’s strategic disagreement with Israel has come to a head over its assault on Rafah with the US pausing shipments of some of its most destructive bombs.

The U.S. government also does not approve of Israel’s widening attacks in the region, which include the bombing of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. Washington has not openly opposed these strikes but has instead tried to pressure the targeted regimes from responding.

The United States has been unable to restrain Netanyahu, who is captive to fascists in his coalition government who are calling for genocide and regional war, especially against Iran. Netanyahu has followed their lead to preserve his coalition government, because if it falls, he will likely be jailed on corruption charges.

Thus, Israel’s genocidal war and regional aggression could trigger a wider war. Already, it provoked the Houthis in Yemen to stage attacks on oil and commercial ships, threatening the world economy, and leading the United States to pull together a coalition to protect their vessels and threaten the Houthis.

But the sharpest and most dangerous of all the conflicts Israel has staged is with Iran. It bombed Tehran’s embassy in Damascus, killing one of the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Washington went into overdrive to pressure Iran from striking Israel and thereby triggering a full-scale war.

In the event, Iran carried out a largely symbolic attack on Israel. It telegraphed its plans to the United States and Arab nations, enabling Israel and its allies to shoot down almost all the drones and missiles. The United States then leaned on Israel to limit its counter-attack. But Tel Aviv nevertheless sent an ominous message with a limited strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In response, Tehran will move forward with plans to develop nuclear weapons and Israel will respond with military strikes to protect its regional nuclear monopoly, threatening Armageddon in the region.

Amid this spiraling conflict, Israel’s barbarity has triggered mass protest throughout the Middle East and North Africa and globally, exposing and isolating both it and the United States as architects and perpetrators of genocide. South Africa brought a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice, charging it with genocide, a case that the Court ruled as plausible.

China and Russia have taken advantage of the crisis to posture as an ally of Palestine, despite their deep economic and diplomatic relations with Israel and their support for stabilization of the status quo in the region. The oppressors of Xinjiang and Ukraine have no grounds to say they support national self-determination.

Nevertheless, the United States has suffered an enormous setback. Its soft power has been fundamentally undermined. No one can scarcely believe its claims to support “a rules based order” or “self-determination” or even “democracy.”

Plans for the normalization of Israel through the Abraham Accords have been disrupted for the moment. With their populations out in the streets and at least expressing sympathy with Palestinians, no Arab regime will publicly cut a deal with Israel, despite their increasing economic integration with the apartheid state, though a number are still advancing those plans behind closed doors

None of these regimes or Iran can be considered allies of the Palestinian struggle. Except for the Houthis, all of them have restricted military responses against Israel. None have cut off oil shipments to the great powers.

There is no real “axis of resistance.” All these states are posturing to keep a lid on popular solidarity with Palestine from tipping over into opposition to their own despotic rule. And when faced with any domestic resistance, all, from Egypt to Iran, have repressed it with brute force. They are all counter-revolutionary capitalist regimes.

Israel’s genocidal war has, however, fundamentally undermined Washington’s attempt to woo sub-imperial states and countries in the region and throughout the Global South. These states and their peoples’ memories of their own liberation struggle leads them to identify with Palestine and to oppose both the United States and Israel. This has produced an unprecedented global wave of popular protest in solidarity with Palestine. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s lockstep support of Israel has triggered relentless protest for the last six months, culminating in a student rebellion on campuses across the country. Further undermining Washington’s claims to be a model of democracy, both political parties in collaboration with liberal and conservative university administrations have repressed that student rebellion with the utmost brutality.

Israel has thus undone all the geopolitical advances the United States made through its posturing around Ukraine, thrown U.S. imperialism into crisis, and put Biden’s reelection in jeopardy. It has also given great space for Washington’s global and regional rivals to become increasingly assertive of their own interests, escalating conflicts throughout the world.

Taiwan: epicenter of the US-China rivalry

Taiwan has become the epicenter of the rivalry between the United States and China. China has set reunification, that is the seizure of Taiwan, as one of its core imperialist objectives. While Biden has promised to maintain its One China Policy and strategic ambiguity, he has repeatedly promised to come to the defense of Taiwan in the event of a war.

To prepare for such a conflagration, he is trying to overcome historic antagonism between regional allies Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and others to unite them in various multilateral and bilateral pacts against China. All of this is ratcheting up conflict over Taiwan.

At the same time, the economic integration of the United States, China, and Taiwan dampens the drift toward war. One of Taiwan’s multinationals, Foxconn, manufactures Apple’s iPhone in giant factories in China for export throughout the world, including the United States. Taiwan’s TSMC is also the manufacturer of 90 percent of the world’s most advanced microchips, which are used in everything from toaster ovens to high tech military weapons and fighter bombers such as the F-35.

Despite this integration, the conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan has intensified throughout Biden’s tenure, with U.S. representatives ratcheting it up even further with provocative visits. For example, Nancy Pelosi staged a diplomatic trip promising U.S. support for Taiwan, prompting China to respond with threatening military exercises. For its part, China has also engaged in provocations to impact Taiwanese politics and send a message to Washington.

In reality, neither great power respects Taiwan’s right to self-determination. China wants to annex it and Washington only uses Taipei as part of its imperial offensive against Beijing. While war is unlikely, because it could trigger nuclear conflagration and wreck the world economy by interrupting the production and trade of microchips, commodities that are just as important as oil to the functioning of global capitalism today, given the sharpening imperialist conflict, it cannot be ruled out.

Slump intensifying interimperial rivalry

Capitalism’s global slump is intensifying the rivalry between the United States, China, and Russia over everything from trade to geopolitics and these strategic flashpoints. The global slump is also exacerbating inequality within and between nations throughout the world.

As the dominant imperialist power in control of the world reserve currency (the dollar), the United States has recovered more successfully than its rivals from the pandemic recession. It is the exception, not the norm in the advanced capitalist world. Despite this, inflation has hammered working-class people and intensified social and class divisions.

Europe and Japan teeter between recession and slow growth, with deepening class inequality. China continues to grow but at a much reduced rate. Russia has implemented a war economy to escape the worst impact of sanctions and maintain growth rates, but that is unsustainable. In both countries, inequality is growing.

The global slump is having similar effects among sub-imperial powers, many of which rely on diminished export markets in the advanced capitalist world. And a severe sovereign debt crisis has exploded in the oppressed and indebted countries of the Global South. The combination of slow growth, weak export markets, inflation, and hiked interest rates has made them unable to repay their loans. While private capitalist lenders as well as the International Monetary Fund/World Bank and China’s state-owned or controlled banks have agreed to partial deals with the indebted countries, they still want their loans repaid and have imposed various conditions to secure repayment. All this exacerbates class and social divisions, in some cases causing the growth of extreme poverty, which had shrunk during the neoliberal boom.

Polarization, revolt, and revolution

The fact that the capitalist establishment, whether in liberal democracies or autocracies, is unable to overcome this slump, will drive greater and greater political polarization, providing an opening to both the Left and the Right.

Given the weaknesses of the far left and the organizations of class and social struggle, various forms of reformism have been the main expression of an alternative on the Left. But predictably reformists in government have been constrained by the capitalist state bureaucracy and their sluggish and crisis ridden economies, leading them to either fail to deliver on their promises or betray them and adopt traditional capitalist policies.

The paradigmatic example is Syriza in Greece. It betrayed its promise to stand up to the EU and international creditors and capitulated to their austerity program, leading it to being voted out of office in favor of a right-wing neoliberal government.

The failures of the capitalist establishment, as well as their reformist opponents, are opening the door globally to the electoral far right and incipient fascist forces. However ethnonationalist, authoritarian, and reactionary, most of this new right is not fascist. They are not building mass movements to topple bourgeois democracy, impose dictatorship, and crush struggles by workers and the oppressed. They are instead trying to win elections within bourgeois democracy and use the state to reimpose social order through law and order policies against various scapegoats, especially migrants fleeing poverty, political crises, and climate change.

In the United States, Europe, India, China, Russia, and other states, the far right is particularly obsessed with attacking Muslims. Almost without exception, the right promises to restore social order by enforcing “family values” against feminists, trans people, and LGBTQ activists.

The right has already made historic gains in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. And in 2024, with elections in 50 countries involving 2 billion people, right-wing parties are well positioned to make more advances.

Perhaps the most consequential of these for world politics is in the United States, where Biden is running on consolidating U.S. imperialism’s alliances and projects abroad and supposedly defending democracy at home. Trump threatens to abandon U.S. imperialism’s project of superintending global capitalism, withdraw from its multilateral alliances, impose more economic nationalist policies, and scapegoat the oppressed at home and abroad to get away with it. In doing so, he would accelerate Washington’s relative decline, intensify domestic inequality, and exacerbate interimperial and interstate antagonisms.

Neither Trump nor the far right anywhere offer the exploited and oppressed any solutions to the crises in their lives. As a result, their victories will not lead to stable regimes, opening the door for the reelection of the establishment parties.

The combination of crises and the failure of governments of any kind to solve them has driven workers and the oppressed into waves of struggle since the Great Recession. Indeed, the last 15 years have included some of the largest revolts since the 1960s.

Almost every country in the world has experienced some form of mass struggle from below, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. All these have been hampered by the defeats and retreats of the last few decades, which have weakened class and social organization and shattered the revolutionary left.

As a result, even the most powerful revolts have not been able to carry out successful political or social revolutions. That has left an opening for the ruling class and its political representatives to maintain their hegemony, often with the backing of this or that imperial or sub-imperial power.

For example, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah saved Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime from revolution. And in another, the U.S. strategy of regime preservation helped Egypt’s ruling class reimpose a brutal dictatorship under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. But these regimes have in no way stabilized their societies. The persistent crises and grotesque level of inequality and oppression keep stoking resistance from below throughout the world.

Three traps for anti-imperialism

The new asymmetric multipolar world order with its growing interimperial rivalries, interstate conflicts, and waves of revolt within societies have challenged the international left with questions it is ill-prepared to answer. In the belly of the beast, the United States, the Left has mainly adopted three mistaken positions, all of which undermine building international solidarity from below against imperialism and global capitalism.

First, those with an orientation on the Democratic Party have fallen into the trap of social patriotic support for the United States against its rivals. They have supported Biden’s call for countries to form a “league of democracies” against China and Russia. This is especially prominent among followers of Bernie Sanders, who, however critical of this or that “mistaken” U.S. policy, see Washington as a force for good in the world.

In reality, as Biden’s support of Israel’s genocidal war proves, the United States is one of the principal enemies of national liberation and social revolution throughout the world. It is the main hegemon that aims to enforce a wretched status quo and is therefore an opponent, not an ally, of collective liberation internationally.

Second, other sections of the Left made the opposite mistake of treating “my enemy’s enemy as my friend.” Variously called vulgar anti-imperialism, faux anti-imperialism, or campism, this position backs Washington’s imperial rivals as a so-called axis of resistance. Some of its advocates go even further claiming that obviously capitalist states like China represent some kind of socialist alternative (even as, for example, Xi Jinping praises far right Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and touts China and Hungary’s “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership for the new era”). Thus, they support rising great powers, sub-imperial states, and various dictatorships in subordinate countries.

In the process, they ignore the imperialist nature of states like China and Russia and the counter-revolutionary nature of regimes like those in Iran and Syria, no matter how repressive they are to workers and the oppressed. And they oppose solidarity with popular struggles from below within them, dismissing them as faux “color revolutions” orchestrated by U.S. imperialism.

They also provide alibis for, and in some cases openly support, Russia’s war on Ukraine and China’s crushing of the democratic uprising in Hong Kong. In the end, they position themselves on the side of other imperialist and capitalist states, going through mental gymnastics to deny their capitalist, exploitative, and oppressive character.

Finally, some on the Left have adopted a position of geopolitical reductionism. They recognize the predatory nature of the various imperialist states and do not support any of them. But when these powers come into conflict over oppressed nations, instead of defending those nations’ right to self-determination, including their right to secure arms to win their liberation, they reduce such situations to the sole axis of interimperial rivalry. In the process they deny the agency of the oppressed nations.

Of course, imperialist powers can manipulate struggles for national liberation to such an extent that they become nothing more than proxy wars. But geopolitical reductionists use that possibility to deny support to legitimate struggles for liberation today.

This has been the position of many on the Left regarding Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine, reducing it to a mere proxy war between Moscow and Washington. But as Ukrainian polls and its national resistance demonstrate, Ukrainians are fighting for their own liberation, not as some cat’s paw of U.S. imperialism.

Based on their mistaken assessment of war, the geopolitical reductionists have opposed Ukraine’s right to secure arms for its liberation from Russia imperialism and opposed shipments, with some going so far as to celebrate actions to block them. A successful blockade of such arms would lead to a victory for Russian imperialism, something that would be a disaster for the Ukrainian people, dooming them to the fate of those massacred in Bucha and Mariupol.

None of these three positions provide the international left a guide to address the questions posed by the new asymmetric multipolar world order.

Internationalist anti-imperialism

A far better approach is internationalist anti-imperialism. In place of siding with this or that imperialist or capitalist state, advocates of this position oppose all imperialisms as well as less powerful capitalist regimes, even if we oppose imperialist interventions against them. We build solidarity with all popular struggles for liberation, reform, and revolution throughout the world and without exception.

In cases of national liberation, we unconditionally but critically side with the oppressed in their struggle for freedom. In those struggles, however, we do not confuse national liberation with socialism, rejecting the temptation to paint such battles with a red brush.

Instead, we adopt an independent approach of building solidarity with the workers and the oppressed within those struggles and cultivating political relationships with their progressive and revolutionary forces to turn struggles for national liberation into ones for socialism.

That leads us to take distinct positions compared with much of the Left on the three strategic flashpoints in today’s imperial order.

First, in the case of Ukraine, we support its liberation struggle and defend its right to secure arms, even from the United States and NATO, but we do not support Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s neoliberal government. We also oppose Western imperialism’s use of Ukraine to advance its own predatory ambitions to open the country and region to its banks and corporations.

Instead, we cultivate relations with the Ukrainian left and the country’s trade union movement. We raise their demands against neoliberalism, debt driven reconstruction, and the opening of Ukraine’s economy to multinational capital. We support their call for a popular reconstruction of the country based on public sector investment with all labor paid livable wages and done by unionized workers.

In the case of Palestine, we oppose U.S. imperialism’s support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and support the Palestinian resistance unconditionally. But that does not mean we support its existing political leadership or its strategy and tactics. We adopt a critical position toward its bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties, whether that is the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or its Islamic fundamentalist alternative Hamas.

The PLO’s main leadership, Fatah, abandoned armed struggle for the illusion of a diplomatically crafted two-state solution. Three decades of such diplomacy has failed, leaving the West Bank occupied, Gaza under siege, and Israel ruling through apartheid over Palestinians within its 1948 borders.

Hamas filled the vacuum in the resistance left by Fatah’s capitulation. It, however, did not develop an alternative strategy, instead continuing Fatah’s old strategy of relying on supposedly friendly Arab and Iranian allies to aid its military struggle against Israel. There is no reason to think that that strategy, which failed when pursued by the PLO, will succeed today.

Backed by U.S. imperialism and buttressed by alliances with most of the Arab regimes, Israel will not be defeated militarily alone. Only a strategy that combines Palestinian resistance against Israel, revolutionary struggle against all the region’s regimes, and anti-imperialist movements in all the great powers can free Palestinians from Israeli apartheid and establish a secular, democratic state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all, including the right of Palestinians to return to their stolen homes and land.

Finally, in the case of Taiwan, we oppose China’s threat to annex the island and defend Taiwan’s right to self-determination, including armed self-defense, and at the same time oppose Washington’s attempt to weaponize the country in its imperial rivalry with China.

We do not support any of the bourgeois parties contending for the leadership of Taiwan, but instead build solidarity with the country’s emergent left, popular organizations, and trade unions. Only they have an interest and the power to challenge both imperial powers and Taiwan’s capitalist class and build solidarity with workers and the oppressed in China, the region, and the United States.

Thus, internationalist anti-imperialism offers a strategy to build solidarity from below among workers and the oppressed against all the great powers and all the world’s capitalists states. We have an enormous opportunity and responsibility to advocate this approach among a new generation of activists who are instinctively opposed to U.S. imperialism and suspicious of other great powers and oppressive states.

We can only prove the superiority of these ideas in practice, in the living struggles–from domestic class and social struggles, to ones in solidarity with Palestine, Ukraine, and other oppressed nations. In doing so, we can help forge a new international left committed to building solidarity from below in the fight against global capitalism and for international socialism.

This piece first appeared at Tempest.