The U.S. Empire Uses Engineered Destabilization to Delay Its Full Demise

By Rainer Shea – Mar 30, 2022

When it comes to the decline of U.S. hegemony, there are two sides to the story, one hopeful and the other bleak. One pertains to all of the ways that the empire’s power is unambiguously diminishing, and to how this is opening the potential for workers democracy to spread to every part of the world. To how Washington has been unable to use its fascist Ukrainian proxy to crush the independence of the Donbass peoples, how Washington’s subversion efforts in places like Hong Kong have failed, how the 2019 coup in Bolivia has been reversed, and other such positive developments. These factors are accelerating the emergence of a multipolar world, and the contraction of U.S. capital to the point where proletarian revolution becomes possible within the imperial center.

But the other side pertains to how at the same time the empire is undergoing these losses, it’s in many areas successfully cutting its losses. Which is to say it’s destabilizing many of the places that have fallen out of its grip, preventing them from developing within the new multipolar order and pulling themselves out of the hell that imperialism has engineered for them. By doing this, the empire is largely preventing them from developing independently, which is what would fundamentally threaten the neo-colonial power structure.

In Afghanistan, the people have gained independence from the extremely corrupt neo-colonial regime that Washington enforced upon them through brutal death squads. But they’ve at the same time fallen under the total control of a reactionary theocratic group that the imperialists created, whose retrograde cruelty is providing narrative precedent for the imperialists to carry out further violence upon the country. Washington is doing this not through Washington’s Uyghur separatist terror group the East Turkestan Islamic Movement—whose attempts to destabilize Afghanistan have been thwarted—but through economic strangulation. Strangulation that’s exacerbating every facet of the shortages the country is experiencing, making for a full-on famine as a direct consequence of the U.S. sanctions.

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Yet as the multipolar world continues to rise, Afghanistan is turning into an example of how a country ravaged by the imperialists can build itself up. China has every intention of carrying out development projects within Afghanistan should its criteria of stability be met, and the failure of the ETIM has brought things much closer to that point. As Xinhua wrote this week about the statements from Afghan foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Belt and Road Initiative draws closer to being brought to the country, and to spreading the kinds of benefits it’s provided to so many other places:

Muttaqi thanked China for providing the Afghan people with valuable and the most needed humanitarian assistance that has helped them go through a harsh winter. The Afghan side is confident of improving the country’s security and stabilizing the situation, so as to ensure the safety of foreign personnel and missions in Afghanistan, he said. Muttaqi added that Afghanistan would like to make itself a bridge of regional connectivity and a land of prosperity for the people, instead of a hotbed of chaos and turmoil. Afghanistan is ready to work with China to take an active part in the Belt and Road Initiative, and enhance cooperation in trade and investment, said Muttaqi, adding that Afghanistan is willing to deepen friendly exchanges with its neighbors, and jointly safeguard regional peace and stability.

In time, Afghanistan will reach a brighter point. As will the peoples in the other places that have been successfully resisting imperial control, but that currently live under siege from Washington’s economic warfare, proxy war instigation, and destructive political meddling. In the Donbass region, the people have just been pummeled by eight steady years of shelling from a genocidal Kiev regime which has sought to colonize the area’s ethnic Russians. They’ve been ravaged by trauma that will last for generations, and forced into the severe deprivation that occurs when a group is targeted by a government that’s trying to break that group’s collective spirit. Yet they’ve successfully resisted, and the western threat is diminishing as Russia demilitarizes and denazifies Ukraine. In time, they’ll be able to build a prosperous society as well.

So will be the case for the people of Myanmar, and Haiti, and Libya, and Ethiopia, and Eritrea, and Syria, and Belarus, and Venezuela, and Kazakhstan, and Lebanon, and Cuba, and all the other peoples whose countries are being subjected to Washington’s perpetual onslaught of engineered destabilization. The sanctions, the backing of terrorists, the coups or coup attempts, the sowing of unrest, the corporate theft of resources and ravaging of lands, the stealing of oil by the U.S. military, the CIA disinformation campaigns, will all go away. And these nations will be able to progress, and ultimately undergo proletarian revolutions (if they haven’t already), in a state of total liberation from empire.

The biggest factor delaying this for all of them is the ongoing existence of the United States, which is an empire both externally and internally; the hundreds of occupied First Nations, as well as the Chicano and African nations, are living in continuous chaos as well due to their being occupied by a settler-colonial state. When the U.S. is abolished—and a socialist indigenous confederacy is built in its place—these nations will be fully free, and the other nations victimized by imperialism will at the least be freed from a global imperialist power structure that’s anywhere as strong as it is now. Such a scenario is hinted at by the progress already made by countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, the DPRK, and Cuba to build themselves up in spite of their dire circumstances.

Two years after Iran famously managed to defy U.S. sanctions by transporting oil to Venezuela, Venezuela has reached a point of independence where Washington has had to start appeasing it in exchange for oil. Cuba, with its world-renowned free healthcare system, has become a global leader in Covid vaccine innovation. Since the socialists took back power in Bolivia in 2020 following Washington’s 2019 fascist coup, Bolivia has been building up its people’s living standards. The DPRK has defied the sanctions to create a society that’s increasingly prosperous within the limitations of its self-reliant paradigm, where the people have workplace democracy, deeply democratic political elections, and a ruling party that consistently does everything possible to provide food, healthcare, and other human rights.

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When imperialism has been sufficiently weakened, these and the other besieged countries will be able to reach the heights of China, the anti-imperialist country that’s gone the furthest in its defiance of colonial destabilization attempts by eliminating total poverty. As Jeremy Corbyn wrote last fall after observing the social welfare and labor policies that Bolivia’s post-coup socialists have so far enacted, Global South movements like Bolivia’s ruling MAS party are getting closer towards such prosperity:

There is a lot we can learn from the Bolivian left’s achievements in power — from protecting nature in its constitution, to embracing multiculturalism, to organizing in communities and workplaces for real change. As internationalists, we must continue to show our support for the MAS, the social movements, and the Arce government against any attempts by reactionary forces — inside and outside the country — to turn the clock back and forcefully restore a right-wing regime intent on destroying MAS’s efforts to advance democracy, human rights, equality, and social progress in Bolivia.

Despite how well social democracy is working for some Global South countries such as Bolivia, we in the imperialist countries should unequivocally reject social democracy as a route towards fighting imperialism, because in an imperialist country social democracy is inextricably pro-imperialist. Social democracy seeks to preserve the capitalist state, and the capitalist state in an imperialist country will always be oriented around exploiting the Global South.

This is the step that the British social democrat Corbyn leaves out; to defeat imperialism, we must embrace proletarian revolution, with its mandate for overturning the capitalist state and building a workers state in its place. Evolving from social democracy—which currently dominates anti-capitalist discourse in the imperialist countries—to Marxist-Leninist revolutionary socialism is instrumental for those in the imperial center to practice solidarity with imperialism’s global victims. By advancing Marxism-Leninism, we can do our part in bringing about that beautiful future where imperialism is extinct, and can no longer harm anyone.

 

Featured Image: US Soldiers overseeing Afghan people in Kabul as in a open air prison

(Rainer Shea)