United States Imperialism
Updated 2024-08-29
2024-07-25 Palestinian Activists Say Biden’s Legacy Is Gaza Genocide and US Imperialism Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is reportedly being considered as a potential running mate for Harris, wrote, “President Biden is a patriot who has served our country honorably in the Senate, as Vice President, and as one of the most consequential presidents in modern history.” While much of the praise Biden has received has been underscored by quiet relief — in Magic 8 Ball terms, I would say the Democratic Party’s prospects in November have shifted from “outlook not so good” to “ask again later” — these conciliatory rehabilitations of Biden’s crumbling image warrant correction.
While “history” is often characterized as an all-knowing, future moral arbiter, the burden of recording truths that should be reiterated across time falls to those living in the present. In addition to ensuring that Biden is remembered as an architect of mass incarceration, a persecutor of Anita Hill, and a friend to segregationists, we must also resist any sympathetic framing of his political descent. While Biden’s supporters have characterized the president as an old man with a stutter who was bullied and betrayed, the truth of Biden’s last act is far more horrific. It is a tale that should be told in ever-climbing death tolls, in the testimonies of doctors who have pulled maggots from the flesh-torn bodies of children, and through the cries of bereft orphans, parents, and grandparents who have lost the “soul of [their] soul” to U.S.-backed Israeli military assaults. As Palestinian scholar, author, and activist Eman Abdelhadi told me this week, “Biden’s name should never be spoken without the names of the dead of Gaza. It was within his power to stop this genocide, and he chose not to.”https://truthout.org/articles/palestinian-activists-say-bidens-legacy-is-gaza-genocide-and-us-imperialism/
2024-03-14 Withering US Imperialism From Ukraine to Gaza Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.
Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.
America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.
Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics. Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.”
Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred. Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, the Times of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.”
After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-imperialism-ukraine-gaza
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