Tag: American hegemony

  • Ask the Editor: Iran, and America’s Doomsday Scenario

    Ask the Editor: Iran, and America’s Doomsday Scenario

    To the editor,



    What is the outcome of the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran?

    Thanks!

    Kora.

    [Sent via Bluesky]

    Hi Kora,


    By many accounts Americans and Israelis approached this military attack with different objectives. For the Americans led by Trump, the objective after the decapitation strike was the quick emergence of a compliant leader that would submit to Washington’s demands on the state. Israel no doubt knew that this outcome was unrealistic but nonetheless were elated to have American assistance with their ultimate goal, which is the total destruction of Iran as a functioning country.

    Alas, nothing has rationalized Iran’s notorious slogan of “Death to America! Death to Israel!” more than this joint U.S.–Israeli attack, which has already blown up children at a school in Minab and brought calamity to the entire population of Tehran. Assassinations and aerial bombardment have led Iranians to rally around the flag and this alone has frustrated American and Israeli designs. Even further, Iran has demonstrated the ability to hold the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf states hostage, while simultaneously inflicting heavy damage to Israeli infrastructure and American bases in the region.

    Iran has a strong hand to play as they try to end this war on their terms: war reparations from the U.S. and Israel, along with international security guarantees against future strikes. Ultimately, this war is one of attrition between Iranian missiles and regional interceptors. Whichever side runs out first will lose.

    If the United States and Israel neutralize Iranian weapons and prevail, the global status quo will remain depressingly the same. Trump will continue to mark more and more countries for imperialist expansion and Israel will solidify itself as the undisputed Middle Eastern military power without any counterweight.

    But the spectre of an Iranian victory against the West’s flagship militaries should not be taken lightly. In the Middle East, perceived strength matters more than anything else. This is how Israel and the United States have managed to expand their influence over Arab politics during the past few decades, despite those countries being massively unpopular amongst the Muslim populace.

    An Iranian victory replete with reparations would shatter the myth of Israeli invincibility and demonstrate U.S. military presence to be a security liability rather than an asset. The net effect would be a much smaller military footprint for the U.S. in the region as they lose control control over the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, the prestige of Iran’s theocratic government in the Islamic world would soar to new heights.

    The Iranian conflict has already become a black hole for critical global energy supplies and western investment in the Gulf. This will weaken the ability of European capitals to aid Ukraine at a moment when Russia expects a windfall from its oil exports. If there is a U.S. defeat by Iran, don’t be surprised if Ukraine is the next western ally to settle a conflict on unfavourable terms.

    The Europeans have been on the receiving end of continuous insults and threats from Trump regarding tariffs and territorial annexation. Having witnessed the limits of U.S. military capability overseas, the next crop of European leaders should pursue a new security regime for their continent that includes a durable peace and trading relationship with Russia.1

    In Asia, the story is much the same. Their energy costs and stock markets have been hit hard by Trump’s decision to illegally attack Iran. They have also been subject to Washington’s erratic tariff policy. But luckily for Asians, they share their continent with a burgeoning superpower that has routinely demonstrated stability and restraint—and has invested in all the right places. China has weathered the oil shock with relative ease, thanks to long-term planning and allocations in green energy and battery technology. For Asia, the increasingly obvious limitations of American security only underline the benefits of deepening economic relations with Beijing.

    The stakes are obviously a lot higher than Trump realized when he decided to take a ride to Tehran with the genocidal prime minister of Israel. Israel, by the way, will be lucky to survive an Iran war loss over the medium term; war-addicted and Spartan countries only function so long as they win the conflicts they start. Across the world, we can expect the Middle East to lurch toward Iran, Asia to lurch toward China and Europe to lurch toward Russia. American military prestige will take a massive hit and the oil shocks this war has caused will do immense harm to Trump’s fossil fuel-driven economic agenda.

    The war is not yet over. But if the zenith of American hegemony passed over the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan, it may be Iran where the nadir is found.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. Polls show European views of the United States in free-fall over their treatment and future elections should reflect this mistrust. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: Does Gunboat Diplomacy Work?

    Ask the Editor: Does Gunboat Diplomacy Work?

    To the editor,


    Why does Trump like gunboat diplomacy and does it work?

    Thank you,

    Tyler.

    [Sent via Bluesky]

    Hi Tyler,


    The shrewd imperialist planner, Henry Kissinger, once said that “an aircraft carrier is 100,000 tons of diplomacy.” Gunboat diplomacy is to international relations what “the stickup” is to people on the street: a violent robbery at gunpoint. No sane person would hand over their wallet just to anyone who asked for it, but a gun in the face will change that equation. Since the 1800s, imperial powers had similarly learned that other countries were a lot more agreeable to lopsided treaties when a naval armada was docked along their coastline and ready to open fire. 

    Gunboat diplomacy was used by the British against China during the Opium Wars, against Haiti when the U.S. stole their national gold reserves, against Japan and Korea for purposes of U.S. trade, by France against Thailand for the relinquishing of modern-day Laos to French Indochina and the U.S. against Colombia for the acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone—to name just a few examples in a very long list.1

    The topic has gained new relevance in the age of Trump’s bulldozer approach to international relations. He has used a mix of tariffs and annexation threats against stalwart U.S. trading partners in order to browbeat them into accepting humiliating trade agreements. Meanwhile, explicit gunboat diplomacy has become Trump’s preferred tactic against countries under sanction and immune to tariffs. The first two months of 2026 have witnessed the U.S. navy kill and kidnap Venezuelans, impose a cruel blockade on Cuba and surround Iran with devastating weapons of war.

    A robber committed to the threat of violent harm does not have to exchange anything of material value in order to receive a ransom. The asymmetry of this transaction is what incentivizes his crime. Trump engages in gunboat diplomacy for the same reason he applies tariffs with zeal—he believes that asymmetrical coercion is the backstop to favourable terms. Under the narrow horizon of short-term self-interest, this approach can appear to work. But robbers do catch blowback. And with history as our guide, we see that this strategy of imperialist aggression often does as well. 

    Japan acquiesced to American demands in the 1800s—but this sent it down a road of aggressive industrial expansion, fascist government, the colonization of Korea and the bombing of Pearl Harbour. The British did impose harsh treaties on China—but these fomented the Boxer Rebellion that laid the foundation for Mao’s decisive civil war victory and modern China’s Marxist outlook. The French did expand their colonial holdings in Southeast Asia—but this, too, boomeranged in the form of subsequent communist revolutions.

    For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Capitalist powers have had the tendency to underestimate the agency of those that they dominate. Every war, tariff and threat introduces a new conflict, a new dialectical friction, into the tapestry of global relations. The United States has embarked on a strategy to leverage its economic and military supremacy in order to vassalize the world and extract surplus value without trading for it. On the surface, this may seem to work. But as global trade increasingly re-routes around the U.S., expect opposition to American hegemony to stiffen until it eventually comes undone.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. See Karl Marx, “The Anglo-Chinese Treaty” in Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007): 31-36 for details of the opium trade imposed on China and unequal treaties pursuant to it. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: ‘The Rupture’

    Ask the Editor: ‘The Rupture’

    To the editor,

    Canada has been targeted with threats from Trump since Prime Minister Carney’s Davos speech. Can you tell me why it was so provocative?

    Thank you,

    Kay.

    [Sent via WordPress]

    Hi Kay,

    Mark Carney’s diagnosis of “a rupture” in the world order has been hailed for its clarion call to middle powers to band together and form a counterweight to American global hegemony. Under threat of U.S. economic reprisals, Carney explained, a variety of demands are now being made on the allies that have benefitted from Pax Americana. As if trying to prove Carney’s point, Trump replied the next day: “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” By acknowledging Trump’s coercive demands, Carney invited another one—stop complaining or Canada might not live.

    Since 2016, Trump has promised to shake down the world on behalf of America and Carney only affirmed that fact in Davos. It is unclear if Trump really understood the content of the message or if he was merely offended that headlines were grabbed by another world leader. The psychological pathologies of the current U.S. leader are difficult to overstate. Unintentionally, Trump’s threatening response to Carney’s speech elevated its importance and imparted a lot more aura to its content than it would have otherwise had.

    Carney only described a rupture in the appearance of the world order. Not its substance. Speaking as an elite financier, Carney cited a controversial former president of Czechoslovakia and said it was only a sign in the window that made people believe in the working class power of former socialist states. As an analogy for the present, Carney implied that the concept of a liberal “rules-based international order” was only ever a guise for operational U.S. global hegemony. Strategic allies such as Germany, Saudi Arabia and South Korea enjoyed market access in exchange for adherence to “American interests”—but this was the extent of the norm.

    The U.S.-led global order has always been transactional and never about hifalutin “democratic values” or rational global governance. The trail of human rights violations, democratic overthrows, targeted assassinations and full-scale invasions is too long to claim otherwise. The revival of state-sanctioned piracy and gunboat diplomacy targeting Venezuela, Cuba and Iran only adds to a long-established pattern of lawless American aggression abroad.

    The shockwave of U.S. military rampage felt for decades in the Global South harkens Karl Marx: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”1 Trump is not a rupture to the American hegemonic order. He is the ruling class without clothes. He offends the elitist sensibility of a Davos crowd not accustomed to being slapped about the head by the swinging dick of America’s president. But let’s exit the world of posh Swiss resorts in the Alps. How about those crowds of Baghdad, Caracas, Mogadishu, Havana, Jakarta, Ramallah or Tehran? Threats of annexation and tariffs against middle powers must appear positively trifling next to the suffocating economic embargoes, CIA-managed torture chambers, genocidal carpet bombings and rock-ribbed support for right wing dictatorships that have visited the Global South.

    As a central banker, Carney is well aware of the vital function that international debt bondage and structural adjustment programs play in securing cheap labour and resources to middle powers. If he seemed to gesture toward the brutal and ongoing excesses of American control without denouncing any examples—this is why. The middle powers lack the scale of the hegemon but they lean on a system of dramatic capitalist exploitation all the same. Carney may be able to capture the zeitgeist of the World Economic Forum but a man with his pedigree will never apprehend the economic basis that is needed to construct a true new world order. 

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” in Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007): 124. ↩︎