The ruling classes’ confusion is our opportunity, if we make uncompromising anti-imperialism our watchword

If you were to travel in a straight line east from Beirut, the Mediterranean capital of Lebanon, over the Chouf mountains, down through the Bekaa valley and on across Syria and into Iraq, on through Iran and Afghanistan, you would cover over 4,500 kilometres before you reached a country, Pakistan, that the US and its allies have not been at war with in the last 25 years.

The marks of destruction – physical, economic, social, and political – would lie strewn along your path for hundreds of miles in every direction.

The new imperial order that was born at the end of the Cold War and reached its apogee with the Iraq War has clearly entered an even more destructive phase, the era of gangster imperialism.

Why?

The roots of President Donald Trump’s unchained imperial strategy lie in the failure of the US’s so-called ‘unipolar moment’, the period after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

Then, the Project for the New American Century enacted by the neoconservatives of George Bush’s Presidency was meant to use the US’s overwhelmingly superior armed force to reverse America’s relative economic decline.

Military might was meant to tilt the globalised international economy in America’s favour. Where the 101st Airborne led, Halliburton and Raytheon would follow. Glory and profit would walk hand in hand.

But it was not to be. Afghanistan and Iraq were catastrophic failures on every level: military, political, and economic. The Iraq Syndrome proved as deep and as long lasting as the Vietnam Syndrome.

Rather than reshape the global economy, the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002-2003 were quickly followed by the banking crash of 2008. Worse still, throughout this long US nightmare, China was growing into an ever stronger global competitor.

The uncompromising violence of Trump’s mob imperialism is a product of the failure of the New American Century to turn out as the Bush neocons desired.

You can hear it clearly enough in Trump’s rhetoric. When he says ‘no more forever wars’ he intends the US electorate to hear that he intends peace. But his real meaning is ‘no more failed wars’. And that means wars will be fought even more brutally, with an even shorter window for success, than they were before.

Trump needs to win before the Iraq Syndrome become the Venezuelan Syndrome, or the Cuba Syndrome, or the Greenland Syndrome, or the Iran Syndrome.

Bluster and bluff, plus limited use of military force, got short-term gains in Venezuela. But Iran is another matter. If he can’t win quickly, the economic chaos created by the war will begin to push his already waning poll figures further south.

And if the war fails to produce any significant change in Iran, just another Iraq/Syria/Libya broken state, then the whole gangster imperialism project will look as much a failure as the neo-con project.

Meanwhile, the European elites have both copied Trump’s militarism and been thrown into chaos by his unilateral mafia-boss approach. European reactions run from Spain’s refusal to be part of the attack on Iran to Germany’s craven toadying to Trump.

Somewhere in the middle, Starmer has used his famously forensic mind to achieve the seemingly impossible position of doing Trump’s bidding while being blamed by Trump for not doing it fast enough.

For the left and the workers’ movement, the road is clear, but hard to travel. The ruling classes’ confusion is our opportunity, if we make uncompromising anti-imperialism our watchword.

From this month’s Counterfire freesheet