Tag: Imperialism

  • Why the Soviet Union Lost the Cold War

    Why the Soviet Union Lost the Cold War

    The experience of the Soviet Union is bound to confront every Marxist at some time or another. If Marxism is able to see further than liberalism, and socialism is superior to capitalism, shouldn’t the first Marxist state still be with us today? Unfortunately for many, the failure of the USSR to win the Cold War is proof enough of socialism’s inferiority and the story ends. But human history is one of trial and error, and the sheer force of the Russian revolution and the magnitude of change it rained down on the world speak volumes to its power. 

    The American Revolution of 1776 was successful. The United States did not carry the heavy baggage of inherited feudal institutions and the ambition of revolutionaries was relatively limited, motivated by slaveowners demanding tax breaks. Bourgeois attempts at revolutionary republics in England in 1649 and France in 1789 were quickly overturned. The Soviet Union, by contrast, lasted for 70 years. It faced powerful external hostility every day of its existence, it inspired Keynesian economics and the welfare state, it spurred millions of revolutionaries around the world to take up arms for national liberation.

    Wealth and Power

    For the Soviet Union, any conceivable path to Cold War victory was narrow. The Tsarist Russian Empire was an incredibly impoverished and economically backward state at the time of the revolution. The vast majority of the country was comprised of an illiterate peasantry and Tsar Nicholas had steered the country into one disaster after another, including ill-fated wars against Japan and Germany. After the Bolsheviks took power, they were immediately plunged into a brutal civil war supported by a multinational invasion force, provoking famine and terror. Anticipating another invasion from the West, Stalin aggressively pushed rapid industrialization upon his country. There was a human cost that paid for this policy but the USSR did prevail over the largest invasion force in history and Stalin is regarded as a national hero in Russia to this day. 

    Although they basked in the glory of victory after World War II, the Soviets had lost 27 million lives to war and Holocaust and eastern Europe was in ruins. The loss of human life and infrastructure in the war set them at a much lower pole position relative to the United States. The USSR clocked impressive achievements in space exploration, military technology and human development programs, but they were unable to break through their inherited disadvantages against western economies despite their status as a leading global power.

    Witnessing first-hand the violence of imperial governments towards workers’ movements, Karl Marx did not believe that the construction of socialism was feasible without access to the most advanced capitalist technologies at the outset.1 The Soviet Union had hoped to make up for these deficiencies by finding a tipping point in the global balance of power. If just enough countries had Marxist-Leninist revolutions, then the capitalist world would be starved of global markets, their economies would violently contract and liberal governance would wither. The Soviets devoted such large quantities of resources toward affecting this outcome that the entire Soviet project effectively became one big bet on global revolution.2

    Despite rapid advancements under socialism in one country, there was a core problem with the structure of the Soviet Union post-World War II, summed up here by Zhang Xiaotong:

    The main reason why over-expansion undermines national security and interests is the inefficient conversion between wealth and power, wasting too much wealth without acquiring the expected power. The collapse of the Soviet Union was largely due to its insufficient economic base to support diplomatic, strategic, and military expansion. It was a failure of Soviet economic statecraft and a triumph of American economic statecraft.3

    For every ally that the Soviet Union acquired, there were expenditures attached in the form of military and economic aid. Almost every Marxist-Leninist state had emerged from conditions of chronic underdevelopment and, often, vicious civil war. Newfound Soviet allies required assistance just to become viable trading partners.4 On the other hand, the United States made money from its clients. Although frontline states of the Cold War in Europe and Asia received copious amounts of aid in the years following World War II, this was easily offset by the rapid expansion of US capital into global markets under the Bretton Woods system.

    Structural Imperialism

    Across Latin America, US corporations expanded profitable mining operations and fruit plantations. In Africa, decolonization on the part of Britain and France opened vast territories to American capital and new opportunities for resource extraction and arms sales. But the real prize for the United States was their partnership with countries of the Persian Gulf. The British had been heavily involved in the Gulf during the colonial era, pioneering oil projects in Iran and the United Arab Emirates, holding a mandate on Iraq and establishing protectorates over Bahrain and Kuwait. British power gave way seamlessly to American influence after World War II, as fledgling monarchies in the region found common cause with the United States opposing atheistic Soviet-style socialism.

    The relationship between the United States and Gulf countries experienced episodic setbacks, such as the 1973 oil embargo against Israeli allies and the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. However in the 1970s agreements were struck between the United States, Saudi Arabia and other fossil fuel-rich Gulf states that created the “petrodollar system” as we know it today. The United States would provide security guarantees to the Gulf in exchange for their pricing oil in US dollars—and only US dollars. Profits from the oil trade would be used by these states to accumulate American bonds, inflate sovereign wealth funds and purchase securities from New York exchanges. 

    The petrodollar system put a money pump right into the veins of American finance. With this system, Washington managed to secure a reliable supply of energy while guaranteeing that profits from all Gulf customers flowed back to the United States through stock and bond sales. Because oil is the bedrock resource of the industrial economy, the petrodollar system has secured the global reserve status of the US dollar for decades.5 In turn, this has allowed the US government to exert obscene levels of power over global financial markets, including the ability to sell near-limitless government debt and isolate sovereign-seeking nations from the world economy. No other country in history has had anything like it—and certainly not the USSR.

    In sum, the United States was able to convert their wealth into power, and their power into still more wealth. Between 1960 and 2020, $152 trillion in value has been transferred to western countries from developing nations in the Global South—with the United States grabbing the largest slice of the pie. In contrast, the Soviet Union had the inverse arrangement; as they acquired more allies, their annual cost in subsidies ballooned from $1.7 billion per year in 1970 to $23 billion in 1980 (84.5 billion in today’s dollars). The US grew richer with their client states while the Soviets became poorer with allies.

    Since every Marxist-Leninist country during the Cold War was primarily running a nationalized economy, the Soviets had no mechanism to exploit the labour or resources of allied nations. The more allies they converted, the more subsidies they paid out. Their pursuit of allies, their quest for an anti-imperial tipping point, led to military expenditures dragging heavily on Moscow’s economy. The final straw for the Soviet Union was a military intervention supporting the communist government of Afghanistan. This operation was made incredibly expensive by the CIA who funded the Islamic mujahideen that fiercely opposed Red Army forces. Yet again, the Soviets found themselves exchanging a large quantity of resources for nothing.

    The Rise of Nationalism

    By the 1980s, the Soviet economy was exhausted by serious imbalances between civilian and defence production. For decades, military budgets had eaten up half of government expenditures and swiped double-digit percentages from the gross national product. In contrast, the United States had a money pump valued in the trillions of dollars plus the global reserve currency status that came with it.6 This is what enabled the United States to recover quickly from the Vietnam War. The US could go dollar-for-dollar with the USSR, they could wreak havoc on socialist economies through sanctions and they could meet them with proxy militias in any field of battle—all this, at a fraction of the cost to their economy.7

    Although 78% of Soviet citizens had voted to preserve the union, the leadership understood that they were on the losing end of a multi-decade bet on international expansion.8 Their entire economy was ordered around it. Instead of a serious reassessment of Soviet spending priorities, nationalists from the Soviet Union’s 15 republics blamed stagnation on their union with the others. Boris Yeltsin, for his part, sincerely believed that Russia’s economy was burdened by the other 14, exclaiming in 1990: “Enough feeding the other republics!”9

    The nationalists were, of course, wildly off-base because the actual cause of Soviet inefficiencies was its incredibly taxing wealth–power conversion and the futility of direct competition with the United States. With a nuclear deterrent in place, there needed to be a tactical retreat from the arms race, socialist autonomy for Warsaw Pact countries, reimplementation of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, greater direct democratic experimentation and cadre accountability, construction of a vibrant worker cooperative sector and revitalized public infrastructure at home.10 The Soviet Union held immense global power and influence—too much— without an adequate civilian economy to hold it up. Serendipitously, the United States now finds itself following in the footsteps of its former Soviet foe.

    The failure to locate the economic contradiction between wealth and power ultimately led to an irruption of nationalist causes that burst into the upper echelons of the ruling Communist Party by the late 1980s. A nationalist political class combined with an empowered bureaucracy to restore capitalism. Seeking personal profit by looting state assets, corrupt Soviet bureaucrats sold off the union to the highest bidder and plunged eastern Europe into catastrophic economic turmoil.

    The Soviet Union was a pioneer that charted waters never sailed before or since. Its transformation of a feudal backwater state into a spacefaring nuclear superpower in the span of three decades is a historic achievement. They made catastrophic mistakes by allowing themselves to become embroiled in a dollar-for-dollar arms race with a colossal imperial power and moving too confidently into a system of absolute state ownership and central planning. Their victory over Nazi Germany likely led the Soviet Union to overestimate their strengths at a time of material weakness relative to the United States.

    What China learned from the Soviet experience is that socialism is not a light switch to be be flipped on. The task of socialism is not only to fight capitalism but to make it obsolete—to go beyond it. To do this requires access to the most advanced capitalist technologies and putting them to use in ways that serve human flourishing rather than profit. Only then can socialism predictably outperform hostile imperial countries and become a self-sustaining reproductive system.

    We leave the world of capitalism only once the notion of selling ourselves for a wage becomes as unthinkable as selling ourselves into slavery. In this multigenerational struggle toward capitalist obsolescence, the Soviet experiment is at once a heroic inspiration and a cautionary tale. As Deng Xiaoping said on his Southern Tour:

    I am convinced that more and more people will come to believe in Marxism, because it is a science. Using historical materialism, it has uncovered the laws governing the development of human society. Feudal society replaced slave society, capitalism supplanted feudalism, and, after a long time, socialism will necessarily supersede capitalism. This is an irreversible general trend of historical development, but the road has many twists and turns. Over the several centuries that it took for capitalism to replace feudalism, how many times were monarchies restored? So, in a sense, temporary restorations are usual and can hardly be avoided. Some countries have suffered major setbacks, and socialism appears to have been weakened. But the people have been tempered by the setbacks and have drawn lessons from them, and that will make socialism develop in a healthier direction. So don’t panic, don’t think that Marxism has disappeared, that it’s not useful anymore and that it has been defeated. Nothing of the sort!

    Thanks for reading!


    1. In “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” New-York Daily Tribune, July 22, 1853, Marx wrote: “Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.” ↩︎

    2. A comparison between US and USSR military expenditures makes the unsustainability of Soviet spending clear: the Soviets consistently spent more than double the United States as a percentage of GNP. From World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1994, in Norman Schofield, “Power, prosperity and social choice: a review,” Social Choice and Welfare Vol. 20, No. 1: 97. For more on the Soviet strategy and Brezhnev Doctrine, see “The Soviet Union’s Global Strategy” published by Santa Clara University. ↩︎

    3. Zhang Xiaotong, China’s Modern Economic Statecraft: A Wealth-Power Dialectic (Routledge, 2025): 8. ↩︎

    4. For a snapshot of Soviet subsidies through the 1970s see: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, USSR: The Cost of Aid to Communist States, June 1, 1981. The public-facing information dispersed by the CIA is obviously horrible propaganda, but their internal documents tend to be reliable. ↩︎

    5. Arya Joshi draws a straight line from the original petrodollar agreement brokered with Riyadh by Henry Kissinger in 1973 and sustained American global hegemony: “How has the US maintained hegemony in the international oil trade through its control of the Middle East?” Journal of Global Faultlines, Vol. 10, No. 2: 136-140. ↩︎

    6. The per annum value of the petrodollar is difficult to ascertain, as it is an economic force multiplier. But it has led to a situation whereby trillions of dollars of US assets are held by Gulf sovereign wealth funds, plus tens of billions in annual arms sales. See: Andrew Mills, “Gulf trio review sovereign wealth investments to offset Iran war impact,”Reuters, March 11, 2026 and Vijay Prashad, “A Primer on the Petrodollar and the War on Iran,” Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, April 16, 2026. ↩︎

    7. Schofield, “Power, prosperity and social choice,” 97. ↩︎

    8. The chasm between leadership and the citizenry is highlighted in Mark Kramer, “The Unintended Revolution,” Journal of Modern European History, Vol. 10, No. 1: 6. ↩︎

    9. The disastrous years in Russia following Soviet dissolution discredit the idea of a Russian economy shackled by the union. In fact, regional economic integration was one of the few efficiencies of the Soviet system that allowed it to industrialize and persist as a major power for decades. ↩︎

    10. With one of his few good ideas, Mikhail Gorbachev implemented the Law on Cooperatives in 1988, but by then it was too little, too late. ↩︎
  • In Brief: The West Can’t Stop Its Collapse

    In Brief: The West Can’t Stop Its Collapse

    Last year, Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan published an article in Al-Jazeera chalking American belligerence toward China up to two factors: an increase in Chinese wages eroding the profitability of foreign investment and the rise of native Chinese industry threatening western monopolies over advanced digital technology, energy generation, automobile manufacturing, biotechnology and robotics. Since western-dominated global capitalism has shown an uncanny ability to offshore capital and relocate investment in low-wage countries, it is undoubtedly China’s threat to monopoly capitalism that has western governments especially concerned.

    The ability to export capital and extract profits from the cheap labour and resources in the Global South has been an extremely lucrative racket for the advanced imperial core countries. $152 trillion was transferred from the developing world to advanced capitalist countries between 1960 and 2021.

    This racket has worked for centuries, ever since Columbus landed on Caribbean shores. It has evolved from outright theft of land and gold, into more sophisticated neocolonial arrangements which harness sweatshop labour and mine resources for sophisticated products stamped with western corporate logos and sold the world over.

    The result has been a river of profits pouring into Europe and the United States, soaking elephantine financial industries and buoying astronomical stock market valuations. But that river only flows so long as the aggregate of advanced technology, patents, licences, designs and money-capital remains steadfast with western corporate headquarters.

    China’s entry onto the stage of high value production does not simply add a new player to the game—it threatens to flip over the board. America is staring down hundreds of billions of dollars worth of potentially stranded assets invested in the AI sector alone.

    China’s Marxian approach to economics has led them to force-feed their supply chain with an abundance of rare earths and critical minerals, renewable energy, steel, electric vehicles and batteries, artificial intelligence platforms, drones, pharmaceutical products and high speed trains. In a bid to transform quantity into quality, China is converting the lucrative monopoly industries of the past into at-cost utilities for the present. And they are squeezing western corporations out of the global market in the process.

    This context is the key to understanding the posture of NATO countries as they pursue rearmament in unison: Trump is demanding a 50% hike to an already-bloated trillion dollar military budget, Canada has signed $100 billion contract for submarines, the UK will dispense an extra £63 billion, Germany has approved a 33% rise in weapons spending, France has committed $500 billion more to its military by 2030—it goes on and on like this. With Russia pinned down by the quagmire of Ukraine, it beggars belief that these trillions of additional dollars are being earmarked to counter threats from Moscow. Western leaders hold their citizenry in contempt when making this claim.

    If human society was governed by anything but the ruling class interests that Karl Marx described, the dawning reality of a new global economy would have spurred a movement toward cooperation, integration with the Belt and Road Initiative and major political and economic reforms adjusting to the new landscape. After all, the people of the West could benefit from low-cost advanced technology, public banks, renewable energy and rational economic planning at the highest levels. But the momentum behind centuries of imperial accumulation does not dissipate like the heat of lightning when the clouds break.

    So long as warfare and financial speculation lines the pockets of the powers-that-be, ungodly sums will continue to be extracted from the working class and put into the service of a western oligarchy determined to break China’s back. Only then can swarms of cheap labour return to East Asia and US corporate monopolies be assured.

    The problems with all of this are legion. What worked yesterday is not always destined to work tomorrow and we are fast approaching a night when tomorrow does not come. Western morality was buried under rubble alongside the bodies of Gaza’s children and the illusion of military supremacy was sunk to bottom of the Persian Gulf. If Iran is the canary in the coal mine, it is clear that all of these billions dumped into offensive weaponry will not yield the surplus required for imperial capitalism to maintain itself.1 In a dialectical reversal for the ages, the quest for self-preservation puts western capitalism on the express path to terminal crisis. 

    China has been described as the factory of the world and it would be prudent to now call it the world’s laboratory and power plant as well. Never mind that going to war with such a formidable power would obviously be unwinnable and catastrophic—it well could happen given the incredibly low calibre of people running the Occidental show. When it comes to protecting their property, history demonstrates that the oligarchy is always willing to fight to the last working class man. As David Harvey pointed out in The Limits of Capital:

    Capitalism is stabilized through the defence budget, albeit in ways that rob society of more humane and socially worthwhile programmes. But the present theory suggests a rather more sinister and terrifying interpretation of military expenditures: not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use.2

    The collapse of the western economy necessarily entails an enormous loss of property on the most rarefied rungs of capital ownership—and this is the good news. If we’re lucky it will happen before an apocalyptic war can commence. Marx wrote that “the violent destruction of capital as a condition of its self-preservation is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production.”3 The collapse will not be where the fight for our future ends. It will be where it begins.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014): 40, David Harvey recounts other modes of production that have disappeared by failure to generate surplus. ↩︎

    2. David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (Verso, 2018): 445. ↩︎

    3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 749-50. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: A Silver Lining to the Clouds

    Ask the Editor: A Silver Lining to the Clouds

    Dear editor,

    Amidst the flurry of travel disruptions, high costs and global conflict, it is hard to see any positives. Is there anything to look forward to in these bleak times?

    Sincerely,

    Helen.

    [Sent via email]

    Hi Helen,

    In Marx’s materialist conception of history, particular attention is paid to the “objective conditions” of individual life and social being.1 These conditions include available technologies, resources, level of accessible material comfort and productive employment that shape our governing ideologies, happiness and culture. In the present economy we are heavily dependent on oil and gas for energy, fertilizer and plastic byproducts.

    This fossil fuel dependency has transformed the resource-rich Middle East into a site of economic competition between great powers. The result is a raging boil of oil money, ethnic strife and a vast quantity of weapons propping up systems of repression, resistance and neo-colonial extraction. What is happening in Iran right now is what happens when the pot boils over, just as it has previously boiled over in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon and Syria.

    It is important for those of us in the West to appreciate just how much of our perceived progress has relied on managing the conflicts and resources of other nations. The capitalist world order was largely cemented by accident, when Old World European technologies collided with New World resources and societies. But its persistence is consciously maintained by way of corporate exploitation of capital starved countries and military containment of economic rivals. In other words, there is an intrinsic relationship between the riches of one country and the poverty of another.

    Having survived the U.S. proxy war with Iraq, Iran became one of those rivals earmarked for “containment.”2 They were systematically marginalized from the global economy with sanctions and surrounded by American military bases. From the American point of view, this containment strategy was largely successful for decades and culminated with massive Iranian protests against the economic conditions of their country. The resulting crackdown only exposed the unsustainability of Iran’s trajectory.

    Luckily for the IRGC, Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran allowed them to unleash the full force of their asymmetric power and they exploded out from the box that had previously contained them. Trump is now confronted with the stark reality that he won’t be able to contain them economically or militarily again. He’ll have to either destroy the country entirely or watch it become dramatically strengthened.

    The bleak circumstances of war are a heavy burden to bear for this geopolitical competition over economic dominance. But if there is a silver lining to these clouds, Iran has plucked it from the sky and laid it at our feet. They have weaponized the global dependency on oil and wielded it to their great advantage; they have exacted a toll from the genocidal state of Israel; they have exposed limits to American militarism, inspiring defiance from tormented nations like Cuba. 

    Since the belligerent and cowardly attack on Iran, the world has turned to greener fertilizers, electric vehicles and renewable solar and wind power generation for energy needs. A helium shortage will put the brakes on a runaway tech sector and military-industrial complex. From the ashes of war, we may find the objective conditions of mankind gradually change for the better. Since a hegemonic power cannot sanction the Sun or go to war over wind, the foundation of a post-capitalist cooperative economy slowly becomes concretized.

    Henri Lefebvre once said, “History puts its worst foot forward.”3 There is a duality to history, a tendency for progress to be paid up-front in coins forged by blood and fire. Iran is paying that price now in opposition to the oil-thirsty American establishment and Zionist lobby.  As allies for a better world, we can always hope that Tehran is the rock where the wave of western imperialism breaks. 

    In sols.

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

    Footnotes:


    1. Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (Holt, 1969): 293. ↩︎

    2. China, Russia/the former Soviet Union and Iran have all found themselves surrounded by American bases at one time or another. ↩︎

    3. Henri Lefebvre cited in Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 287. ↩︎
  • 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. ↩︎
  • How Iran Can Win, According to Sun Tzu

    How Iran Can Win, According to Sun Tzu

    “Under heaven thunder rolls.” 

    —I Ching

    Donald Trump once commissioned a ghostwriter to put his name to a book called The Art of the Deal—but he’s clearly never read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Consider a staple teaching from Master Sun: “So it is said that if you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperilled in every single battle.”1 Doubtless, the Pentagon has very capable military commanders, tacticians and a massive arsenal of weapons at their disposal. In matters of war, the balance of power heavily favours America’s legions of imperial soldiers. But with Trump as their commander-in-chief, they fly blind in terms of strategy.

    In his political career, Trump has branded himself as an “America First” isolationist, allergic to “forever wars” that divert resources from the homeland. He has boasted about ending eight wars, a Nobel Peace Prize-worthy effort. When he did not receive said prize, he declared himself to be untethered from thinking about peace. After Venezuela amassed a citizens militia to deter American invasion, Trump opted to kidnap the president and threatened to kill his successor unless she complied with U.S. demands. The revolution in Venezuela is now in tactical retreat but the ink is not yet dry on the results of Trump’s acts of violence. Before even knowing what he had accomplished in Venezuela, aircraft carriers were positioned in the Middle East to set about duplicating the Venezuela operation all over again. This time it was in partnership with Israel and against the much more formidable opponent of Iran.

    He Who Wishes to Fight

    They began with a familiar decapitation strategy, taking the more audacious step of murdering Iran’s head of state rather than merely kidnapping him. They hit 500 targets and launched cyberattacks to encourage a domestic uprising against the government in Tehran. From interviews, Trump evidently believed that the combined external and internal pressure on Iran would bring a compliant leader to the foreground—an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez. But Trump confusingly oscillates between stated objectives in Iran, his motivations for attacking the country are unclear and he has struggled to define his relationship with war in general. In short, this is a man who does not know himself. And he does not know his enemy either.

    Although the Venezuela operation was a tactical success for U.S. planners, the hardcore Chavista apparatus remains in place to live another day. Assassinating the Ayatollah Khamanei, on the other hand, galvanized grief and anger across the Shia world. It was an abrasive action that could not be interpreted as a “limited strike” by Iran’s theocratic government—much to Trump’s chagrin. The Iranians responded by setting in motion a battle plan that they had transcribed for weeks beforehand: regional conflict targeting the energy infrastructure of Gulf countries and closing the Strait of Hormuz. This plan was no secret, yet Trump astonishingly went on the record stating that the Gulf escalation was the “biggest surprise” of the conflict. Which brings us to another valuable lesson from The Art of War: “If you don’t know their strategy, you should avoid battle with them.”2

    Iran’s escalation was clearly not accounted for by U.S. strategic planning. Only afterward did Trump realize he’d need a mass evacuation of American citizens, a British base for operational support, Ukrainian assistance to counter Shahed drones and more arms production to prosecute the war effort. His “big wave” aerial bombardment appears to be only an ad hoc response to the failure of a domestic rebellion to materialize and Iran’s refusal to capitulate to illegal U.S. and Israeli aggression. 

    Since Trump does not know his enemy, he may not be aware that Iran is fighting from “deadly ground”—a place where death is assured unless it can be fought out from. By constantly reneging on diplomatic agreements, assassinating leaders at will, surrounding their country with military bases and demanding the forfeiture of missiles, the United States has given Iran no choice but to fight in order to achieve deterrence against their enemy: “When you cannot press forward, cannot retreat backward and cannot run to the sides, you have no choice but to fight right away.”3 And so they have.

    Iran is surrounded by American bases.
    Opportunity in Chaos

    Iran has adopted the sort of high-risk strategy to be expected from an army on deadly ground. But it is logical according to The Art of War: when outnumbered by a massive opponent “first deprive him of what he likes” and focus strikes on “what is weak.”4 The disabling of the Gulf state infrastructure and the Strait of Hormuz satisfy both criteria, as Iran is able to strangle the oil and gas supply from small countries that form the weak underbelly of the Persian Gulf. These countries are within range of Iran’s abundant store of short range range missiles, creating outsized pain for a fossil fuel-addicted world.

    Iran’s strategy going forward will be to “find out where [the enemy is] sufficient and where they are lacking.”5 They will accomplish this by testing Israeli and American defences with low intensity but consistent missile and drone barrages in order to deplete interceptor inventories and conceal Iranian launch sites as much as possible. Expect Iran to refrain from ineffectual large attacks unless U.S.–Israeli defensive gaps appear. Only if missile defences are diminished will they be able to strike for a maximum psychological impact—like the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War. 

    Karl Marx observed that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”6 Iran is at an extreme disadvantage with their heavily sanctioned economy now pitted against the military might of much wealthier opponents. The only reason they are in this fight is because of the deficiencies of current U.S. leadership. Of the eight types of decadence that compromise commanders according to The Art of War, Trump suffers from no less than five of them: insatiable greed, jealousy of the wise and able, making friends with the treacherous, a liar with a cowardly heart and talking wildly without courtesy.7 

    Iran’s path to victory is narrow but existent. It relies on their ability to absorb cruel and punishing aerial bombardment with clever military decoys and camouflage; to achieve critical depletion of the enemy’s missile interceptors; to inflict unsustainable economic pain on the West. All three criteria will have to be met before a strategic victory and future deterrence becomes a possibility. Failing to meet these goals will either result in the destruction of Iran’s 2,600 year old civilization by civil war or the bare survival of a weakened Islamic Republic that is sure to be in conflict again soon against bloodthirsty enemies. Regardless of the outcome in Iran, The Art of War has this to say about the fate of the United States: “Even if a country is large, if it is militaristic it will eventually perish.”8

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Shambhala, 2003): 85. ↩︎

    2. Ibid, 121. ↩︎

    3. Ibid, 158-9. ↩︎

    4. Ibid, 451. ↩︎

    5. Ibid, 116. ↩︎

    6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩︎

    7. Tzu, Art of War, 224. ↩︎

    8. Ibid, 254. ↩︎
  • 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. ↩︎
  • US Aggression in Latin America: A History

    US Aggression in Latin America: A History

    When the U.S. government purchased Louisiana from France, they secured a land stretching from present-day Montana, through Oklahoma and terminating at the Gulf of Mexico. However a new dispute opened with Spain concerning the southwest boundary of the formerly French territory: Texas. The Americans felt that they had acquired the territory as part of their deal with France but Spain maintained that it was them who had control over that land. The Spanish sale of Florida to Washington was meant to settle the Texas issue and the U.S. government formally relinquished its claims as part of the transaction. But American settlers on the frontier had other ideas.

    Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821 and was quickly recognized by the United States. Initially the two countries enjoyed friendly diplomatic relations, with the Treaty of Limits affirming Mexican sovereignty over Texas and other western territories, including present-day Arizona and California. Within this cordial political atmosphere, American homesteaders were invited to settle in Texas and help to stabilize a fragile Mexican economy. What they received was an unruly population with little respect for Mexican sovereignty, much less Mexican people or customs.1 Tensions came to a boil when Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. As many American settlers had brought slaves with them, they would have faced a loss of property if the Mexican law was enforced. Instead they took up arms, kicked out Mexican authorities and demanded to be annexed by the United States.

    Early Aggressions

    Mexico warned the U.S. that their border treaty would be nullified if they annexed Texas. The Mexicans undoubtedly misunderstood the expansionist spirit of manifest destiny, having been fooled by prior friendly relations with Washington. The resulting Mexican–American War dropped the full brutality of U.S. superiority down on Mexico like the hammer of Thor: boys were shot for sport; churches were desecrated and Catholics murdered; women and little girls were stripped naked and assaulted in unspeakable ways; entire villages were razed by fire.2 The barbarity only halted when the U.S. military occupation of Mexico City forced the surrender of 55% of Mexican territory.

    The Mexican–American War was not any kind of dark chapter in the history of U.S.–Latin America relations. On the contrary—it set the mould. With the conquest of new territory stretching to the Pacific, American commercial interests began to reach down the coastline and into Central America.

    The western appetite for bananas and other tropical commodities brought US capital into contact with a new swathe of Latino peoples—and it went about as well for them as it did for the Mexicans in years prior. The ravaging of Mexico proved to America, with its powerful industrial economy, that it could act with impunity toward its less-developed neighbours to the south. Their capital and guns afforded them enormous power over a region that lacked both.

    Warfare is defined as an “open and declared armed hostile conflict between nations.” The Banana Wars of the early 20th century carry an unfortunate title because they were not wars—they were repeated molestations of vulnerable populations by an imperial power.

    When Haiti and the Dominican Republic fell into debt, the US deployed artillery, machine guns and naval ships. They stole the national gold reserves, turned government finances over to New York banks and gave American corporations free access to land for sugar plantations run by forced labour. When a nationalist insurgency threatened foreign property in Nicaragua, marines arrived to quash the rebellion. They proceeded to take over government finances and established a military base to suppress future anti-American revolts. When Washington decided to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, they backed a secessionist movement that would pull the small, pliable country of Panama from the lands of Greater Colombia. When abhorrent working conditions on American-owned sugar plantations in Cuba sparked civil unrest, thousands of marines arrived to protect the harvest and suppress anti-American agitation.3 When plantation workers in Colombia protested payment in coupons rather than cash and demanded a six day work week, the United Fruit Company massacred the strikers. In Honduras, United Fruit kept workers’ movements at bay by paying off presidential candidates and funding right wing militias. This combination of efforts made the corporation the most powerful entity in the state.

    The Dictatorships

    The advent of the Cold War brought American hegemony over Latin America to new heights. With the US military in confrontation with communist forces in Asia and Europe, covert action and special operations were relied on in the Western Hemisphere. Across Latin America, torture chambers and CIA-trained death squads blossomed alongside a growing number of brutal right wing dictators aided by Washington. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela all suffered visits from oppressive regimes that consolidated power and murdered their opposition under the cynical guise of “anticommunism.” Even modestly progressive and liberal-democratic movements were snuffed out in many of these countries, as elections were overturned and American corporate interest reigned supreme.

    This was the Latin America that confronted a young Che Guevara as he embarked on his notorious motorcycle journey across the continent. On his trip he witnessed the the cold and hungry conditions of mine workers in Chile and the faces of poverty in Peru, people who “go on living only because it’s a habit they cannot shake.”4

    Guevara correctly understood that the division of Latin America into “unstable and illusory nationalities” made the region ripe for exploitation and US domination.5 He saw this domination first-hand in 1954 when living in Guatemala, where an elected government proposed land reform for its farmers. Soon afterward, it was overthrown by American bombers in order to install a pro-United Fruit Company dictatorship headed by Castillo Armas, a CIA asset who murdered thousands of people. This experience proved the futility of representative democracy in the face of powerful corporate interests.

    Having been marked for execution by the homicidal U.S. puppet in Guatemala, Guevara fled to Mexico where he met Fidel Castro and joined the Cuban revolutionary struggle. Cuba was also ruled by a pro-US dictator at this time and he oversaw routine executions of political opponents and a Cuban economy where American corporations controlled approximately 40% of sugar production, 90% of mining concessions, 100% of cattle ranching, 80% of utilities and had a monopoly on imports. Additionally, the corruption of the Batista regime allowed the American Mafia transform Havana into a drunken cesspool of gambling and prostitution. 

    With striking lucidity President John F. Kennedy admitted: 

    I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime.

    The success of the Cuban revolution saw the re-appropriation of national property and the destruction of casinos by throngs of empowered Habaneros. The revolution went on to deliver universal housing, healthcare and education, restoring dignity to a despoiled country. However, the antagonism would re-emerge in the form of a suffocating economic blockade and countless coup attempts.

    The Debt Racket

    The end of the Cold War brought more liberal governance to Latin America but they were saddled with debts carried over from the era of military juntas. From this situation came America’s next racket: the “Washington Consensus,” which was little more than a set of neoliberal dictates devised by western financiers for nations held in debt bondage.

    Mass privatization, austerity budgets and easy American access to cheap labour and resources were the hallmarks of crisis financing in the 1980s and 1990s, pulling in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico and Venezuela—resulting in La Década Perdida (the Lost Decade) of stagnant economies and soaring inequality. In other words, the Washington Consensus represented another hegemonic “push from the United States” for “trade agreements favourable to the United States…The free flow of capital that these trade agreements were designed to foster has only benefitted the rich nations and the wealthy classes.”6 Derivative of these neoliberal policy prescriptions is a migration crisis and the 21st century “pink tide” of elected progressive governments throughout Latin America.

    From the Banana Wars era to the present day, we can see that Che Guevara was proven right: liberal democracy in exploited countries is too weak to uplift the great majority and a lack of regional solidarity has made it easy for the United States to run roughshod over Latin America. In terms of real purchasing power, the region has been economically stagnant for 50 years, with examples of worsening poverty and shrinking middle incomes over that time. The pink tide movement was driven back by “soft” coups in Brazil and Bolivia, corporate pressure and repeated attacks from Washington on Latin American progressive heads of state. One pink tide country which resisted coup attempts and foreign subversion was Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. 

    In a span of 14 years Chavez was able to double school enrolment, make literacy and healthcare universal, raise access to safe drinking water from 82% to 95%, build 700,000 homes, return one million acres of land to indigenous people, reduce malnutrition from 21% to 3%, and cut unemployment and infant mortality in half. His government accomplished this through a program that forcefully eschewed liberalism in favour of participatory democracy at the neighbourhood level, worker-owned enterprises and nationalization of resources and services. For these successes, the United States delivered to Venezuela the same verdict that Cuba received decades ago: economic strangulation, with the harshest measures arriving in 2019.

    What Venezuela and Cuba represent is an expression of defiance in the face of 180 years of unbroken US hegemony in Latin America. For this reason, they are admired by a great many people who “personally suffered under US-sponsored military dictatorships that dominated much of the region” for decades.7 The kidnapping of Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, is an attempt to force compliance with the pillaging of Latino resources that American corporations feel entitled to. Cheering this move is fatally wrong, even for opponents of socialism: if Venezuela and Cuba are the backlash to United States interventionism, it follows that another intervention could make the situation much worse.  

    What the United States has done to Venezuela will perpetuate the familiar cycle of political violence and economic dependency—the breeding ground for anti-American resentment—serving nobody but the corporate lobby. The best moments in US–Latin America relations occurred when America expanded the realm of sovereignty rather than crushed it: the turnover of the Panama Canal to Panamanian authority and FDR’s short-lived Good Neighbour policy of non-interference in the region. As long as Latin American politics remains a reaction to American doctrine, the Western Hemisphere will not be free.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. The irony of this development in Texas compared to present-day complaints over immigration should not be lost on anyone. ↩︎

    2. See: Stephen Carney, The Occupation of Mexico (Government Printing Office, 2016): 20, 37, and Peter Guardino, “Gender, Soldiering, and Citizenship in the Mexican–American War of 1846-1848” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 119, No. 1: 43. ↩︎

    3. Louis A. Perez Jr., Intervention, Revolution, and Politics in Cuba (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 98. ↩︎

    4. Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (Ocean Press, 2003): 41.  ↩︎

    5. Ibid, 92. ↩︎

    6. Teresa A. Meade, A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present (John Wiley & Sons, 2022): 8. ↩︎

    7. Ibid, 10. ↩︎