Saying No To The Empire Is Not Enough
By Max Elbaum
We won’t stop US wars, effectively tackle climate change, stave off US-style fascism, or halt the march to a nakedly might-makes-right world order without a vision for a transformed role for the US in today’s interconnected world.
The joint US-Israeli war against Iran puts an exclamation point on the Gaza genocide. It sends a message to the world from the regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv that if you didn’t get it before, you better get it now: We will do absolutely anything that our military strength allows us to do. There are no rules or international laws we are bound to acknowledge, much less respect. You have two choices: capitulate or be destroyed.
Most European governments, all too many regimes elsewhere, and major sections of the Democratic Party leadership here offer at most a few “process objections” to this level of ruthlessness but go with the flow.
This is a road to global catastrophe. It will accelerate a process that was already underway where every government in the world decides that their overriding priority must be increasing their military strength. And, like the US and Israel, they will conclude it is only prudent to crack down on opposition movements within their own countries.
New Thinking for the 21stCentury
To halt and reverse this course, it is essential but not sufficient to build mass opposition to the war on Iran and all the other evils perpetrated by Washington, The US Left needs a foreign policy platform that projects a positive global role for the US and can gain enough popular support to catalyze a broader and deeper resistance to Trump 2.0 and then shape the policy of a post-MAGA government.
Developing that vision starts with facing the reality of an interconnected world where humanity’s very survival is in doubt. Without in the least softening our critique of the US-dominated world order that is passing away, it entails assessing the heightened dangers in the new order that Trump 2.0 is driving us toward. It requires learning lessons from the most positive experiences of longstanding antiwar, anti-racist, solidarity, and climate justice movements.
A valuable step in that direction would be taking a fresh look at a brief period 40 years ago when discussion of global cooperation and de-militarization – including massive cuts in military budgets and complete elimination of nuclear weapons – moved from the margins to the center of global politics. The high point was a 1986 US-USSR Summit during which President Ronald Reagan, an arch-hawk, was forced to seriously consider a pact with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear weapons. This unprecedented development stemmed from both grassroots pressure for peace and bold disarmament proposals and a stress on humanity’s common interest in survival coming from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of “New Thinking” about foreign policy and perestroika (restructuring Soviet society).
In adopting “New Thinking” the Soviet leadership was not breaking new intellectual ground. As Gorbachev put it:
“New Thinking did not come out of the blue. It had its origins in the thought of Albert Einstein [“everything has changed except our thinking”] and Bertrand Russell; in the anti-war movements of the 1950s and 1960s…The core of New Thinking is the proposition that humankind’s common interests and universal human values must be the overarching priority in an increasingly integrated, interdependent world.”
What distinguished the Soviet initiative was that it was the first time that such a perspective was adopted as the official policy of a powerful state. And in a groundbreaking speech to an unprecedented meeting of Communist and other Left Parties and Movements on the 70thanniversary of the October Revolution, Gorbachev specified the ways the new Soviet policy created more favorable conditions to struggle for democracy, national liberation and socialism:
“[there are] two especially dangerous manifestations of capitalism’s objective laws: militarization and non-equivalent exchange with the developing world. However, they are only possible if they are backed by an appropriate governmental policy. But that policy will continue to enjoy support only so long as fear of the “Soviet threat” remains… and so long as people continue to believe there are ‘subjects’ of world politics and there are ‘objects’ – that is, the sphere of neocolonialism.
“Our perestroika…is eliminating the fear of the ‘Soviet threat’ and militarism is losing its political justification… We will not in any way renounce the genuine values of socialism. On the contrary, we will enrich them, and at the same time get rid of everything that distorted the humanitarian idea of our system. We do not expect our class adversary to become ‘enamored’ by us. We do not need that at all…
“For socialism, this policy secures a merging of its class interests as a system and the interests of all humanity. And for capitalism too there is no other sensible way than coexistence and competition… Joint action alone can lessen and remove the global danger of an ecological ‘heart attack’.”
A positive pole of attraction
Coming off the heightened nuclear fears of Reagan’s “Second Cold War,” audacious disarmament initiatives from one of that era’s two superpowers moved the idea of a nuclear-free world from a utopian dream to a practical possibility. The first World Climate Conference in 1979 had been a major step in alerting the world to the threat from global warming. The notion of global cooperation in building a sustainable and nuclear-weapons-free planet resonated with millions. It linked a vision of a changed international order with the concerns of individuals, families, and peoples for their own safety. In tandem with the antiwar and disarmament proposals from Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, leading forces in the US resistance to Reaganism in the 1980s, these initiatives echoed the internationalist spirit that infused Dr. Martin Luther King, SNCC, and others in the radical wing of the Black-led 1950s-60s Civil Rights Movement.
The prospect of a post-Cold War “peace dividend” to boost economic development and a relaxation of tensions that would provide favorable terrain for popular movements gave the global Left a platform to offer “realistic hope.” Even socialism’s most ardent partisans realized in the 1980s that our North Star goal was not on any near-term horizon, and that goal appears even further away today. A Left that cannot offer any program for a safer and better world short of revolution will remain on the margins in this country.
A product of weakness as well as vision
The New Thinking vision captured the imagination of millions. But it was fleeting. This was because the radical shift in Soviet foreign policy, and the program of perestroika in general, grew out of the USSR’s deep economic and political weaknesses. Gorbachev was frank about this:
“Our country was sinking ever more deeply into stagnation. The economy was, for all intents and purposes, at a standstill. Ideological dogma kept intellectual and cultural activity in a straitjacket. The bureaucratic machine sought total control of society’s life while being unable to satisfy people’s basic needs….
“The militarization of the economy was a big burden for all countries, including the United States and its allies. Yet for our country, this cost was particularly high. In some years, total military spending amounted to 25-30 percent of gross domestic product, i.e., five to six times as much as in the United States and other NATO countries…. However, excessive armament did not make our security more reliable…. It was clear to me that continuing the arms race was not the path to lasting peace.”
While Gorbachev’s initiatives aimed at ending the Cold War made headway, his proposals for economic restructuring failed to yield positive results. The new openness in Soviet society (glasnost) succeeded in fostering a large-scale reckoning with the crimes of the Stalin era. But nationalist, chauvinist, and pro-capitalist movements rose and gained far more strength than working-class-based strivings to renew socialism. As the USSR hurtled toward collapse, Washington quickly returned to policies based on the worst of imperial ambition, using military force to show the world it was the global hegemony (via the first Gulf War) and vigorously pushing its recently initiated neoliberal economic model across the world.
The reasons for the Soviet collapse, which are of course connected to one’s assessment of the Soviet Union before 1985, remain a topic of sharp disagreement on the Left. But whatever one’s views in that debate, the so-far-unique experience of a powerful state taking Einstein’s “everything has changed” perspective as a starting point for a foreign policy stressing nuclear disarmament and environmental protection offers lessons for addressing today’s dangers.
Competing visions as the old order collapses
We’re in a moment when this quote from Gramsci is deservedly popular throughout the Left: “The old order is dying, and the new one is struggling to be born.” The different factions of the elite oligarchy are rushing into this “interregnum” to shape what comes next.
MAGA/Trump 2.0 argues that considering values like democracy or human rights when formulating policy are somewhere between naïve and treasonous, and that international agreements and multilateral institutions are simply shackles on US power. Staying number one in global “lethality” is the road to safety and prosperity for the “heritage Americans” who will dominate the country after solidifying white supremacy and removing or subordinating the various “others” who now live in the US.
The anti-MAGA wing of the US ruling class counters by arguing that the “rules-based” world order of the last 80 years was key to the wonderfulness of the American way of life. We just need to correct some of its “mistakes” (Vietnam, Iraq) to get back on the right track. Let’s preserve the “Western alliance of democracies,” keep China at bay, and use “soft power,” sanctions, multilateral institutions (where the US calls the shots), and “smart wars” to remain the world’s dominant power and bring safety and prosperity to the US people.
The Left has trenchant critiques of the racism and exploitation inherent in both variants of Washington’s imperial project. But we won’t win the majority of people to our side if we don’t go beyond critique to offer a positive vision of what the world can look like if we are in position to shape US policy.
Global cooperation as a powerful starting point
That vision has to address the hopes, fears, and pressing needs of the majority of US people. It has to be compelling enough to counter the American exceptionalist ideology that permeates US culture. Resting on the longstanding position of the US as the hegemonic global power and promoted unceasingly by the political class and mainstream media, the idea that the US is an inherently virtuous nation whose actions are those of the world’s “good guy” has long defined US “common sense.”
Antiwar and solidarity movements targeting Washington’s role in Vietnam, South Africa, Central America, Iraq, and most recently Palestine have spotlighted the destructive role the US has played in each case and at least temporarily won a portion of the population to an overall critique of US imperialism. At times, energetic social movements have convinced majorities of the importance of arms control agreements and aggressive steps to fight climate change. But we have yet to win a durable majority to a structural critique of imperial behavior and support for an alternative world order where all countries are on an equal footing, conflicts are resolved via diplomacy rather than violence, and a rapid transition away from fossil fuels is a worldwide priority. If we fail in that, a new incarnation of racist and authoritarian militarism may come roaring back even if we succeed in pushing MAGA out of power this time around.
The Left has always stressed the common interest of the global majority in fighting imperial exploitation. But in a period when the most dangerous threats to human life – climate change, nuclear war, global pandemics, obscene degrees of inequality – can only be addressed by joint action by all countries, the arguments against American exceptionalism and the way it makes US national sovereignty absolute become stronger and more urgent. This is why taking the concept of global cooperation based on common human interests from the “New Thinking” experience is the key starting point for formulating a radical foreign policy to put before the US people.
Building on that foundation, additional dimensions of international relations need to be addressed in formulating a comprehensive Left foreign policy: Among them are:
■ A framework for global rules for trade, debt, and other economic interactions among countries that tackles global inequality both between and within countries. There are a host of penetrating critiques of the neoliberal model of capitalist globalization to draw upon for this, as well as positive proposals for what Focus on the Global Southcalls “a healthy balance between national and international economies, diversity in economics and governance, and strengthening local and national economies.” (While Focus on the Global South uses the term “deglobalization” to describe such proposals, others offering thoughts in a similar vein use the terminology of “progressive globalization.”) There are also useful ideas to draw upon here from the 1970s proposals for aNew World Economic Order and a New World Information Order put forward by the Non-Aligned Movement at a time when that alignment of governments in the global South had considerable unity and political initiative.
■ A set of proposals for reforming and strengthening international organizations, conventions, and treaties. The damage being done byTrump’s withdrawing the US from a host of global institutions is considerable, but a Left program must go beyond advocating a return to those institutions as they were structured pre-Trump. The demands of ongoing campaigns to reform the United Nations in a way that ends the Security Council veto power now held by the US, Russia, China, the UK and France, and to put the US under the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and others need to be considered and many adopted.
■ Renewal and enforcement of theInternational Convention on the Rights and Protection of All Migrant Workers and Their Families. Racist assaults on the rights of immigrants are a key part of the global Right’s drive for political power, and defense of migrants’ rights by figures, organizations and parties of the center and center left has been uneven at best. This is intimately linked to the need for cooperation to mitigate global inequality and the climate crisis, because those are among the strongest drivers of migration. But a positive vision of “new immigration order” also needs to be part of the foreign policy platform of the US Left.
As the last point on immigration indicates, in today’s world the boundary between “domestic” and “foreign” policies is very blurry. They are interconnected, and we will need to continue to make that intertwining visible and concrete for people—for example, contrasting the bloated military budget with gaping holes in programs that meet human needs; looking at the way the global spread of bird flu spiked the price of eggs, pointing out how climate change has intensified floods, blizzards, and fires that have ravaged communities; stressing the way militarism abroad comes back home in the form of militarized surveillance and valorizing a toxic version of masculinity. In that sense, a Left vision for a post-MAGA foreign policy is a necessary component of an overall program for aThird Reconstruction that moves the country toward a durable multiracial, gender-inclusive democracy on a peaceful, sustainable planet.
Amid a continuing genocide in Gaza and a killing-spree-of-choice war against Iran, the numbers of people saying “stop” to the guardians of empire is growing by the day. Fanning those flames of opposition and offering these millions a vision to fight for is the combination needed to accumulate the political power to transform the US role in the world.
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“Saying No to The Empire Is Not Enough” originally ran in Convergence Magazine