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The government of American Samoa, however, recently filed a brief urging the court not to hear Fitisemanu, arguing that the constitutional separation between the states and the territories is essential to preserving fa’a Samoa, or the traditional Samoan way of life. The government worries that applying the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause to American Samoa would endanger the hereditary titles and land ownership essential to the matai system, potentially leading to the type of cultural erasure experienced by Native Hawaiians. These concerns raise an important question: How can we as a country address the racist logic found in the Insular Cases while ensuring that those efforts do not further harm indigenous communities or go against the wishes of those living in certain territories? I argue that the court should still overturn the Insular Cases, but this action must be accompanied by new political frameworks that support the self-determination of those living in US territories.

At a surface level, the case is marketed as a direct analog to Plessy—a discrimination relegating a predominantly nonwhite community to a formally separate constitutional status. But what those marketing Fitisemanu as Plessy fail to mention is that every single one of America Samoa’s elected leaders opposes judicial resolution of this question. Indeed, the American Samoa government intervened in the litigation to oppose judicial imposition of birthright citizenship, advancing a position that is backed not just by the government in its corporate capacity, but by unanimous resolutions of both houses of its legislature, its Governor, and its nonvoting Delegate to Congress.287 The American Samoa government, which is separately pursuing legislative and administrative reforms to ease the path to naturalization for those born in American Samoa who wish to move to the U.S. mainland, has made clear that it sees judicial imposition of citizenship over the objections of its entire elected government as an anomalous act of judicial imperialism.288 Such a ruling would, in their view, usurp the territory’s ongoing efforts towards political self-determination, open the door to dispossession of their native lands to outsiders, and threaten legal recognition of their way of life.

Enter the Insular Cases. In the earlier Tuaua case, the D.C. Circuit declined to hold that people born in American Samoa are U.S. citizens by virtue of the Citizenship Clause, crediting American Samoa’s concerns about how judicial imposition of birthright citizenship would threaten “social structures inherent to the traditional Samoan way of life, including those related to the Samoan system of communal land ownership.”289 To do so, the court surmised, would be “an exercise of paternalism—if not overt cultural imperialism—offensive to the shared democratic traditions of the United States and modern American Samoa.”290

Even the most cursory attention to this adjacent context would reveal that the endeavor to cast the Insular Cases entirely within the mold of Plessy is fraught. As Blackhawk observes, not only does the history of colonialism and dispossession of native lands “offer[] different, yet equally important, lessons about how to distribute and limit governmental power,” it is also frequently the case that “[i]ntegrationist . . . frameworks like that of Brown are feared in Indian law, rather than celebrated.”363 Noting that those frameworks and their rhetoric “have long been used as a tool to further the colonial project against Native peoples,” both directly as an instrument “of dispossession” and as a force “to disrupt the power of tribal governments,”364 Blackhawk argues that “[t]he judiciary, long viewed as the ideal branch to empower in order to protect minorities, has been devastating to Indian law.”365 Indeed, contemporary efforts to diminish tribal sovereignty and erase special federal recognitions for tribes like the Indian Child Welfare Act—efforts that trace back to some of the same lawyers behind Tuaua and Fitisemanu366—is awash in rhetoric that likens solicitude for Indian tribes to “separate-but-equal.”367 Addie Rolnick’s contribution to this Yale Law Journal Special Issue takes an even broader view of what this portends, foreseeing that aggressive constitutional litigation in the territories—litigation that has passed below the radar of even the many Indian-law scholars and advocates who are mobilizing against these same arguments in other types of litigation368—may be a new proving ground for legal strategies that seek to not only refashion the Reconstruction Amendments’ “race jurisprudence to prevent recognition of Indigenous rights,” but to carve a “newly strengthened vision of colorblindness” that will eventually boomerang to “further chip away at the rights of non-Indigenous minorities.”369

At the heart of the Supreme Court’s troubled history with Indian law is the seeming tension between the assimilative force of formal equality ideals and the Court’s perpetually wavering recognition of tribal sovereignty.370 As for the American Samoan intervenors in Fitisemanu, Indian law is marked by threshold ambiguities concerning both the source and scope of federal power over Indian affairs. This widely manipulable ambiguity frequently forces Indian communities into a “double bind” when weighing exercises of their sovereignty and when arguing before federal courts. In the words of Angela Riley, Indian communities often “must continue to defend a system that produces inequities in order to stave off any further encroachment” of their tenuous sovereign recognition.371 Because so many “questions remain as to whether and to what extent tribal governments are constrained by the Bill of Rights or comparable restrictions,” as well as “how inherent tribal sovereignty relates to the power of Congress to modify tribal rights,” tribes—and now American Samoa—have been forced onto a tightrope between invoking rigid constitutionalism as a shield against state-government or congressional domination and embracing arguments that sound in accommodating culture or autonomy in “extraconstitutional” zones.372 Indeed, it should come as no surprise to find a recognition of the difficulties that federal judicial review has posed for Indian tribes at the surface of American Samoa’s discourse on birthright citizenship and land tenure.373

Without a law of the territories, there is only denial. Aurelius suggests that in a post-Insular Cases world, we might say that the Constitution “applies” equally to the territories, but the foreseeable reality is that their wholesale disenfranchisement and subordination will endure if not deepen.439 A law of the territories is necessary to police promise breaking and to reinforce the political legitimacy of forthcoming self-determination at the same time that it is necessary to prevent the notion of “respect” for self-determination, Indigenous rights, or autonomy from weaponizing into a license for invidious discrimination and permanent neglect. Without this, Aurelius-style constitutionalism foreshadows twin harms: the further entrenchment of second-class citizenship and—to borrow the words of Judge Poole—“a genocide pact for diverse native cultures.”440

Stohr '22 [Kimberly Atkins; trial and appellate litigation attorney in Boston. Kimberly is a native of Michigan, and a graduate of Wayne State University, Boston University School of Law and Boston University College of Communication, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.; "The (unheard) case of American Samoa"; 11-9-2022; published BostonGlobe; accessed 7-24-2023; https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/11/09/opinion/unheard-case-american-samoa/; ror]

The concept that people born on U.S. soil are citizens from birth may seem simple and straightforward. For American Samoans, it is anything but.

In the United States, key sectors of monopoly-finance capital have now succeeded in mobilizing elements of the primarily white lower-middle class in the form of a nationalist, racist, misogynist ideology. The result is a nascent neofascist political-class formation, capitalizing on the long history of structural racism arising out of the legacies of slavery, settler colonialism, and global militarism/imperialism. This burgeoning neofascism’s relation to the already existing neoliberal political formation is that of “enemy brothers” characterized by a fierce jockeying for power coupled with a common repression of the working class.7 It is these conditions that have formed the basis of the rise of the New York real-estate mogul and billionaire Donald Trump as the leader of the so-called radical right, leading to the imposition of right-wing policies and a new authoritarian capitalist regime.8 Even if the neoliberal faction of the ruling class wins out in the coming presidential election, ousting Trump and replacing him with Joe Biden, a neoliberal-neofascist alliance, reflecting the internal necessity of the capitalist class, will likely continue to form the basis of state power under monopoly-finance capital.

Appearing simultaneously with this new reactionary political formation in the United States is a resurgent movement for socialism, based in the working-class majority and dissident intellectuals. The demise of U.S. hegemony within the world economy, accelerated by the globalization of production, has undermined the former, imperial-based labor aristocracy among certain privileged sections of the working class, leading to a resurgence of socialism.9 Confronted with what Michael D. Yates has called “the Great Inequality,” the mass of the population in the United States, particularly youth, are faced with rapidly diminishing prospects, finding themselves in a state of uncertainty and often despair, marked by a dramatic increase in “deaths of despair.”10 They are increasingly alienated from a capitalist system that offers them no hope and are attracted to socialism as the only genuine alternative.11 Although the U.S. situation is unique, similar objective forces propelling a resurgence of socialist movements are occurring elsewhere in the system, primarily in the Global South, in an era of continuing economic stagnation, financialization, and universal ecological decline.

The organizing logic of social security systems is currently marked by a tension. On the one hand, unlike the ‘classical’ arrangements of high-income post-war welfare states, social security policy is no longer framed primarily in terms of decommodifying labour and collectivizing the risks associated with capitalism (Esping-Andersen, Citation1990). Instead, it is predominantly seen through its potential to create unsustainable public spending and high levels of public debt, or its unintended impact on welfare dependency (Hills, Citation2014). This discursive shift toward welfare state retrenchment is manifest in reforms which have reduced government spending, recommodified labour, and privatized risks by reconfiguring the conditions of entitlements and the structure of financial support (Hills, Citation2011; Pierson, Citation1994; Timmins, Citation2017). On the other hand, however, implementing welfare state retrenchment has been far from easy (Hacker, Citation2004). Indeed, in many ways the basic contours of the social policy landscape remain relatively unchanged. This is particularly true if we look at overall public expenditure on social policies for most high-income countries, even those considered to be more liberal (or more commodified), such as the United Kingdom. This is because cuts are difficult to implement, as harms are typically concentrated on vulnerable groups, whereas the benefits politicians accrue by implementing such cuts are diffuse (Pierson, Citation1994). In this paper, we analyse the design and implementation of Universal Credit(UC) in the United Kingdom to illustrate how this tension–between the resist-ance to privatizing risks and the costs associated with welfare dependency–gets instantiated. UC has been described as ‘one of the boldest and most radical reforms since Beveridge’ because it streamlines the system of existing benefits, bringing together six different forms of social security into a single form of welfare (Timmins,2017 ). This streamlining was intended to ‘activate’ citizens(moving them into employment) by making it easier to move between out-of-work and in-work benefits (Hills,2014 ). But UC does not merely institutionalize a mantra of ‘active citizenship’(Reeves & Loopstra,2017 ). On the contrary, we show the uneven, chaotic and at times outright disastrous effects of the roll-out of this most recent wave of welfare reforms. As people become unable to meet its requirements, they fall foul of the system of conditionality and sanctions, which is ultimately pushing many away from the labour market, while at the sametime communities that have already been harshly hit by a decade of austerity are further destabilized by the individualizing effects of a new digital welfare state. Drawing upon a mixed-methods analysis that brings together existing quan-titative research with original qualitative fieldwork, we argue that the efforts of politicians and policymakers to place ‘active citizenship’ more squarely at the Insa Koch and Aaron Reeves: From social security to state-sanctioned insecurity449heart of welfare states has fostered the kinds of insecurities commonly associ-ated with commodifying labour, all while leaving the state’s involvement inthe lives of those affected largely intact. Unable to simply reduce welfare spending or recommodify labour entirely, policymakers have engaged in a process Thelen (2003) calls ‘conversion’, whereby the purposes of a policy or an institution are remade. In the context of UC, this means existing systems of social security are being reconstituted with the consequence that the machin-ery of the state is now assuming an ever more central role in creating uncer-tainty. Welfare conversion is not merely ‘privatising risks’, however, by exposing citizens to the insecurities associated with the market. Rather, we argue that these reforms are turning the state itself into the creator of certain risks by converting (whether intentionally or not) social security into a form of state-sanctioned social insecurity. This happens as particular state interven-tions–including those relating to work-related conditionality, sanctions, and the digitalization of the welfare state–have disproportionately affected someof the most vulnerable members of the population and further weakened the capacities for collective resistance in communities that have been most severely affected by welfare reforms.Our analysis contributes to wider debates on the ‘state of the welfare state’(Koch & James,2020) by bringing perspectives from within the anthropology of the ‘everyday state’(Alexander,2000; Fuller & Bénéï,2001;Koch,2018;Spencer,1997;Thelenet al., 2014) to bear on social policy debates. Thus, although our focus is on a particular policy, we are not primarily interested inthe policy itself. Rather, we go beyond traditional social policy perspectives byseeking to understand the social reality these policies create (Dubois,2009). Meth-odologically, this leads us to start with how UC manifests itself in the lived experi-ence of people subject to UC in order to identify its wider implications for relations between citizens, the state and the market (Patrick,2017 ). Our second, more conceptual contribution is to theorize UC as a form of policy conversionwhich arises from the historical tension between policies which seek to (de)com-modify labour. Doing so allows us to develop an argument about a qualitative shift in welfare state making, one which both draws on older logics of commodification but which is also distinct in the way it intensifies these logics by turning the state itself into a dispenser of heightened risk. It is precisely this production of risks through the mechanism of the state, rather than the market as commonly assumed (Harvey,2007), that we refer to as ‘state-sanctioned insecurity’–a process which may well be representative of broader welfare developments in the years to come, and which raises the need for urgent political change. Competing logics in the welfare state: Between de-commodifying labour and enacting welfare retrenchment While most countries share a commitment to ensuring a basic standard of living for citizens, societies’ understanding of what constitutes ‘bare life’450Economy and Society changes over time (Agamben,1998). This is true in the United Kingdom and many other high-income countries, where certain economic and social forces have reconfigured the assumptions people hold about their government’s role in ensuring a basic standard of living. For example, one key dimension around which welfare states have been formed is the degree to which labour is de-commodified or not, that is, the degree to which households can maintain a socially acceptable standard of living independently of engaging in the labour market (Esping-Andersen,1990). In the United Kingdom specifically, the post-war welfare system which placed limits on the de-commodification of labour was premised on what T.H. Marshall (1950) called ‘social rights’–a belief in extending certain basic entitlements to all citizens, with benefits rooted in work. The United Kingdom, then, implemented a partial de-com-modification of labour through ensuring some groups (such as the elderly and to some extent children) would not need to rely on wage labour for their live-lihood (Timmins,2017). And yet, de-commodification was not extended to everyone. There have always been conditions attached to most forms of social security (Hills,2014). Those who failed to engage productively with the market have been subject to stigmatization (McArthur & Reeves,2019)which helped legitimise the harsher forms of welfare conditionality appliedto those lacking ‘respectability’(Tyler,2020), including with respect to some of the most valued social goods, such as council housing (Koch,2018).But it was only during the 1980s that the political impulse towards welfare retrenchment and the stigmatization of those who continued to rely uponbenefits became far more prominent (Clarke & Newman,2012). Governmentscame to emphasize unsustainable levels of public spending and the belief thatwelfare regimes fostered a culture of dependency (Hills,2014; Somers &Block,2005). Whereas the logic of‘social rights’had assumed the statewould collectivize the risks associated with ill health, unemployment and oldage, the new logic of social security was one of‘privatising risks’through re-commodifying labour by exposing it to market forces more completely. Thispresumed a more residualised form of risk sharing, whereby individualsrather than collectives bear their costs. The interface between state andmarket was the central battleground on which policy conflicts were waged,with market-oriented approaches becoming ideologically dominant. Further,with the global financial crisis in 2008/2009, reducing government debts wasmade the key policy goal in many European countries (Clarke & Newman,2012). Welfare recipients became the scapegoats, as they were seen to be the ones pushing up government spending, creating unsustainable levels ofpublic debt through their unwillingness to work and threatening economic recovery. By stigmatizing those on social security, the Conservative-led coalition government elected in 2010 sought to legitimise policies intended toreduce government deficits by cutting public spending through policies likethe bedroom tax and the benefit cap (Koch,2018) and through withdrawing funding from local communities (so-called‘austerity localism’) (Lowndes &Pratchett,2012).Insa Koch and Aaron Reeves: From social security to state-sanctioned insecurity451Yet, the financial crisis on top of decades of neoliberal reform did not simplydo away with welfare states’commitment to collectivize risks associated with thefree market. It did not suddenly alter the political calculus that had made re-com-modification of labour difficult in the post-war decades, nor did it remove thepowerful constituencies who were likely to fight retrenchment. Thus, whilethe ideational shift towards welfare retrenchment–increasingly prominentsince the late 1970s–has led to real differences in how social policies are orga-nized, there is also a surprising degree of stability in social welfare programmes,such as universal healthcare services, pensions and working-age benefits (OECD,2019 ;Pierson,1994 ). Indeed, this shift was only successful in allowing the ser-vices provided and the protection offered to become devalued in real termsover time. Instead, welfare states have typically come to tackle the ensuing ten-sions through a mantra of ‘active citizenship’(Reeves & Loopstra,2017 ), which refers to the obligations on which entitlement to social security is predicated, and the forms of welfare conditionality that come with it. As a policy mantra, this hasbeen central to social security provision at least since the 1990s, as people aretypically only entitled to social security if they are active in a specific kind ofway and failure to do so results in financial penalties (Timmins,2017 ). But, aswe will see below,‘active citizenship’has experienced a period of resurgencesince the financial crisis where policies, including UC, have more explicitelylinked welfare entitlement to different forms of conditionality.In short, even just a cursory glance at the history of post-war social securitypolicies reveals a central tension at the heart of the welfare state, in the UnitedKingdom and beyond: between an ever-greater drive to commodify labour, onthe one hand, and governments’inability to completely remove the state fromproviding‘bare life’(Agamben,1998 ), on the other. While in the‘classical’period of post-war British social democracy, this tension tended to be resolvedin favour of the latter, more recently, political impetus has pursued an ideologicalagenda in line with the former. Yet, even today, a commitment to offering aminimum level of social security protection continues to exist, resulting in ten-sions that are instantiated in the mantra of‘active citizenship’. This, in turn,raises the question of how governments reconcile these tensions. We now turnto one way in which governments have attempted to do so through a processof adaptation that Thelen (2003 ) refers to as‘conversion’, and illustrate thiswith reference to the case of UC. We will argue that despite important continu-ities in existing social security provisions, it is in redirecting policies towards newaims that policies like UC have impacted the lived experiences of citizens, thusalso transforming relations between citizens, the market and the state in far moreradical ways than anticipated by politicians and welfare reformers.

The most important feature of the modern world order, arguably, has been its imperial structure of racialized, capitalist hierarchy. The contours of this hierarchy of wealth, political power and legal standing have changed significantly since its inauguration in the fifteenth century, but its continuity as a basic fact and its implications for the world since so-called decolonization should remain at the center of our description and analysis. The pervasive nature of these imperial dynamics means that the tasks for postcolonial political theory are vast. The very categories that have structured the discipline of political science since the end of the Second World War contribute to the challenge. Political theory was conceived in the postwar period largely as the study of the state and of politics within states, alongside a discipline of International Relations that took itself to be the study of the relations among states, with an implicit understanding that the states in question were post-imperial and disavowing its own prewar past as a discipline preoccupied with the management of colonial and racial hierarchy. Postcolonial theory, in contrast, refers not to a time after the end of empire, a condition that we are nowhere near achieving, but rather after the inauguration of the modern imperial world order (Seth, 2013, p. 1). Twentieth-century anticolonial thought offered precisely such an ‘expansive account of empire that situated alien rule within international structures of unequal integration and racial hierarchy’ (Getachew, 2019, p. 2). as well as resourceful political responses to that condition, now just beginning to be tapped by disciplinary political theory. As I’ll suggest below, W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings on the global order, beginning during the First World War, remain one potent source of empirical analysis of and theoretical insight into this phenomenon. Indeed, the continuing resonance of his account of the imperial global order underscores how much persists, despite changes as seemingly significant as formal decolonization and the onset and then the end of the Cold War. The tenacity of this imperial formation is due in part to the flexibility, and the attractions, of some of its key legitimating discourses, including liberalism and international law. In Boundaries of the International, I studied the relation between imperial structure and discursive scaffolding by exploring the mutual constitution of international law and the imperial global order. I stressed the politics of international law’s conceptual frames: the ways in which an image of the world as an international community of free and independent states was used to justify European imperial domination, and sometimes to criticize it, but especially to occlude it. The state system itself, that is, as an ideology and as a set of legal institutions and political practices, entrenched imperial hierarchies while simultaneously obscuring them with the appearance of formal equality, as it continues to do. As a conceptual frame, or ‘language of disclosure’, the notion of an international community of states has thus obscured or distorted much of global politics since it was invented, and as it was entrenched over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Tully, 2008, vol. 2, p. 127). It follows that any discussion of the politics of territorial states, or of the world as a system of such states, must take place alongside a recognition of more fundamental imperial structures. Given the extent of the task of taking stock of the persistence of global hierarchy, I hesitate to write prescriptively about what political theorists concerned with empire should be considering. Since we were invited to take Boundaries as a point of departure, though, I can begin by noting some of the ways I had hoped it would be engaged and taken up, as well as some of the questions and dynamics that the book does not address and lines of approach that I hope to follow in future work. I am only too aware of the limitations of the approach I took in Boundaries, particularly that it privileges discursive contexts over material dynamics and that its objects are mainly European thinkers, as Vasko, Ince and Nichols observe below. Among the book’s key preoccupations are the epistemic pitfalls and political limitations of the dominant conceptual framework that we have for talking about global politics, as a community of independent territorial states. Boundaries addresses the historical development of this framework and its occlusions but says less about their implications for contemporary normative theory. To place imperial structures at the heart of our critical descriptions of the global order may be to challenge quite fundamentally both the ideal of an international community of free and equal nations and the cosmopolitan ideal that has constituted its main rival within normative international theory. The notion of such a community of states that respect one another’s autonomy, while offering assistance when needed, is in many ways a compelling normative vision. But it has always also been, as is commonly the case in international law, an aspiration couched as a description, a conflation that has generated two different but related problems. First, to the extent that the aspiration has been used as a working description, it has masked the imperial nature of European states (as in Rawls, 1999). Second, to the extent that the aspiration has been shaped by empirical assumptions – for instance, as to what forms of prosperity or solidarity are possible in the modern nation-state – it has presupposed conditions that came about through imperialism and in many instances remain dependent on global hierarchies. This is one reason among many to relinquish ‘liberal-democratic’ states of the global north as normative models. Du Bois’s critique of what he called ‘democratic despotism’ illuminates these two intertwined but distinct problems. As I only began to suggest in Boundaries, Du Bois’s First World War essays offer a profound contrast with the views of the European international lawyers and political theorists of whom my study is a critique. Du Bois saw the modern world order not as an expanding community of states but as a global economic and political system shaped above all by the dynamics of imperial domination. His early efforts to make sense of the industrial imperialism of his present involved a longue durée global history linking conquest, commerce, and race, and showing that the key political developments on which modern Europeans prided themselves – advancing freedom and equality under democracy, the increasing prosperity of their populations – were parasitic on imperial exploitation. His critique bore on the interaction of ideas and material forces: white supremacy and European ideas of civilization together with the operations of global capital. The ideology and the legal and institutional structure of the international system facilitated the exploitation inevitable under capitalism by placing it in imperial and racialized spaces outside the bounds of ‘international’ concern. And because European democratization itself relied on imperial exploitation, empire had morphed into a distinct and novel phenomenon: ‘democratic despotism’. The sharing of imperial spoils eased social conflict within Europe, simultaneously reconciling the ruling ‘captains of industry’ to increased power-sharing at home as long as they had continued impunity in the colonies, and mitigating the poverty and political agitation of the European masses through colonial profits and consumer goods (Du Bois, 1915, p. 709). Despite the fact that the white working classes themselves suffered under imperial capitalism, white socialists and their labor supporters failed to acknowledge or to combat the dynamics of global domination because they were also its beneficiaries: ‘in this crime white labor is particeps criminis with white capital’ (Du Bois, 1921, p. 7). They had been seduced into demanding a greater share of imperial profits, rather than recognizing that ultimately their own liberation depended on their working to end the even more extreme exploitation of non-whites around the world. On Du Bois’s account, the modern nation – and therefore the international system – was not, as other critics such as J.A. Hobson were arguing, perverted by imperialism, but in fact created by it. The Euro-American nation-state system emerged as an idealization perched atop structures of global empire. A wealth of recent scholarship on empire, settler colonialism, and their contemporary instantiations, develops these Du Boisian insights, drawing the connections between racial and imperial domination ‘within’ societies and between them, tracing the connections between democracy or popular sovereignty and imperial subjugation, elucidating the dynamics of racial capitalism, and attending to the resources in anticolonial thought and action, especially in political solidarities across the global south. As Aziz Rana argued in Two Faces of American Freedom, freedom and equality among whites in the North American colonies, and then the United States, depended materially and symbolically on the exploitation and expropriation of subject communities: ‘settler empire was the servant of a unique and robust view of self-rule, seen by many as crucial to the fulfillment of emancipatory ambitions’ (2010, p. 3). Settlers’ ongoing insistence on interpreting Indigenous claims for land and political autonomy in their own terms, moreover – as claims for property rights and cultural freedoms – renders them impervious to the radical challenge such claims pose to the settler-colonial model of development, capital accumulation by means of dispossession, and the political practices that depend on them (Coulthard, 2014). These pathologies are closely bound to the broader dynamics of democratic despotism identified by Du Bois – to democratization in non-settler imperial states – in ways that bear on both democratic theory and the study of settler-colonial societies. The economic and political life of European metropolitan citizens was similarly premised on imperial domination and expropriation: the industrial productivity enabled by the opening of agricultural land in the western hemisphere to European economies; the fueling of the European working class by sugar calories made cheap by the use of slave labor; the sense of political inclusion of the working class generated by a shared colonial project. Class conflict in Europe was mitigated, democratic communities forged, and welfare states inaugurated on the back of imperial expropriation, white supremacy, and, as Inés Valdez has shown, racialized imperial labor control. Valdez’s account of the immigration policies of contemporary nation-states as ‘imperial remnants rather than legitimate attributes of sovereignty’ (2019, p. 22) sheds light on contemporary right-wing populism and exposes the limits of left positions on migration that seek to protect only domestic labor while leaving capital’s global exploitation of labor unchallenged. Thanks to the global hegemony of the United States, the constellation of distinct but connected forms of imperial domination that has characterized American history – slavery, settler colonialism, and conquest of both adjacent and more distant territory – has ramified around the world. As the sociologist Matthew Desmond (2019) has argued, America’s ‘low-road capitalism’ – characterized by depressed wages, extreme inequality, racism, union-busting, the punitive disciplining of workers, lax regulation of labor standards, and ‘normalized insecurity’ – can be traced to slavery. If that low-road capitalism is not typical of wealthy countries, on Desmond’s account, its centrality to the world’s largest economy intensifies the imprint of empire on the contemporary world economy, while the exploitation by global capital of labor in more vulnerable states amounts to the exportation of low-road practices outside the political boundaries, but not the economies, of other wealthy states. Just as Du Bois had demonstrated the continuities between empires and European nation-states as their chief modern agents, he also showed that postcolonial states suffered new iterations of imperial domination obscured by international law. Anticipating the idea of neo-colonialism developed by Kwame Nkrumah and others in the 1950s, Du Bois argued in 1925 that Liberia, one of the few formally independent African states at the time, was wrongly ‘looked upon as a self-steered craft, master of her own fate instead of being, as she has always been, a canoe tossed on raging economic currents which eddied out of the slave trade of the eighteenth-century into the swirl of the World War in the twentieth century’ (Du Bois, 1925, p. 327). As it was for Liberia in Du Bois’s time, debt remains a major mechanism of neo-colonial control, now enforced by a rigid ‘statist’ norm of repayment that states in the global north did not abide by before the 1930s, when they were the major borrowers and defaults were common. This norm, widely considered to be both apolitical and indispensable to the functioning of international finance, is neither. It imposes extraordinary costs on the populations of postcolonial states, while encouraging speculators and investors to make indiscriminate loans, confident that, however illegitimate, predatory or transitory a given regime or loan package, the population is on the hook for repayment (Lienau, 2014; Roos, 2019). In this way, international law and norms, and a flawed, tendentious understanding of their history, discipline postcolonial states to adhere to unprecedentedly onerous repayment terms and further entrench their subjugated international standing. In Boundaries I followed Martti Koskenniemi in treating law as a set of discursive and institutional resources mobilized by ‘people with projects’, asking what sort of political work these resources did for those who deployed them (Kennedy, 2000; Koskenniemi, 2002; Marks and Lang, 2013). The focus of the book’s analysis and critique is liberal ideology as it appeared in the discourses of the law of nations and international law. I recognized the importance of profit motives and commercial agents to this history, but capitalism was not a central category of analysis. Still, given that modern empires and capitalism developed jointly, and must be understood in relation to one other, it would have been useful to address more explicitly the relationship between liberalism and capitalism, as does recent Marxian work in the history of international law that has sought to capture the ‘systemic logics at work’ in international legal hierarchies (Marks, 2008, p. 302) and the literatures on racial capitalism and colonialism that Ince flags below. Where my emphasis in Boundaries tended to be on the persistent violation of international law’s avowed norms of freedom and equality, and the obfuscations of that violation that the articulation of the norms has performed, this scholarship tracks more explicitly liberal international law’s work in service to imperatives of capitalism: the domination performed by the norms themselves rather than by their violation. International law, as these accounts show, created the conditions necessary for capitalism by ‘reconstructing the world in the image of a particular kind of “free” and “equal” or “sovereign” legal subject’, one with individual rights, especially freedom of religion and conscience, and rights of property and freedom to trade (Parfitt, 2019, p. 57). The democratic nation-state as it emerged in Europe, then, was both a creature and an agent of imperial capitalism, though in its self-conception it was the antithesis of empire and its successor in a historical progression toward a more just and equal world. Just as the capitalist corporation is sometimes described as an ‘externality machine’ – a structure designed to internalize profits while offloading costs onto others – the western democratic nation has never been self-sustaining, but rather took the form that it did only by imposing devastating costs elsewhere. I have alluded to the attractions of some liberal and democratic norms and of the ideal of an international community of nations treating one another with mutual respect as independent and as equals; the same can be said of the concern for the dignity and moral equality of every individual that underlies cosmopolitan projects in political theory. Du Bois himself saw ‘but one adequate method of salvation – the giving of democratic weapons of self-defense to the defenseless’ (at other times he might have said the taking of such weapons by the defenseless) (Du Bois, 1915, p. 712). If these values are to serve as the basis for critique or constructive political projects we must continue to reckon as he did with their imperial entanglements past and present.

Taken in its totality, the archive of counterinsurgency is an extended, insidious mutation of the Civilizational “American” text. Counterinsurgency attempts to toxify imagination while laying siege to collective practices of radical freedom and autonomy. It is not only formed in the state’s repressive military, policing, and political might, but is also advanced through the narratives, aesthetics, rhetorics, and institutional solicitations of reformism. Various institutional responses to the global uprisings of 2020 openly expropriate the language, thought, and creativity of radical, abolitionist, revolutionary, and anti-colonial movements as part of a cultural ensemble of counterinsurgency. The symbolic, aesthetic, pedagogical, and other cultural productions of counterinsurgency attempt to domesticate the lexicons of revolt in what might be conceptualized as a strategic reformist conquest of ideas and imagination, knowledge and language, pedagogy and aesthetic. Published in 2006, the US Army and Marine Corps’ Counterinsurgency field manual (also known as US Army Field Manual 3-24) articulates multiple pedagogical strategies and tactics as primary methods for subduing and pacifying resistance to US militarism and empire. While much of the text familiarizes readers with on-the-ground military protocols for neutralizing insurgencies against US occupation and “integrating civilian and military activities” (Chapter Two), it also weaponizes “The Learning Imperative” as a primary technology of occupation. Counterinsurgency directs Army and Marine Corps officers to Open channels of discussion and debate … to encourage growth of a learning environment in which experience is rapidly shared and lessons adapted for new challenges. The speed with which leaders adapt the organization must outpace insurgents’ efforts to identify and exploit weaknesses or develop countermeasures.13 [emphasis added] There is nothing in Counterinsurgency to suggest that its contents are not as applicable to the political geographies of the United States as they are to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Mindanao. Addressing the text’s interdisciplinary and multiple methodology approach to pacification, Wendy Brown writes in her 2008 review of Counterinsurgency that its contents exhibit a “relentless confounding of conventional boundaries among military, political, economic, and anthropological spheres of activity, on the one hand, and [an] upending of conventional military structure and protocol, on the other.”14 That this text was downloaded about 1.5 million times within a month of its publication in December 2006 further indicates that it has been perused by a broad audience of readers that extends well beyond Army officers, War on Terror soldiers, or professors and students at West Point (the US Army’s prestigious military academy).15 Counterinsurgency, in other words, seems to be a versatile publication with a remarkably wide circulation that belies its origins and intended usage. Perhaps it is worth considering how this military text both reflects and informs a geography of war that encompasses the reformist responses to an early twenty-first-century crisis of police legitimacy. In resonance with Brown’s critical review, I would situate Field Manual 3–24 as part of an extended statecraft of counterinsurgent domestic warfare in continuity with the long legacies of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO).16 Counterinsurgency departs from COINTELPRO, however, by adopting a more expansive approach to asymmetrical warfare and (domestic) pacification. While retaining the broad, urgent objective of slowing and neutralizing militant opposition to and revolt against US police/colonial power, the field manual foregrounds interdisciplinary methods of solicitation, selective empowerment, and reform, including piecemeal changes to economic, governmental, and schooling infrastructures. Counterinsurgent reformism, in this instance, is a primary composite of an ensemble of legitimation: notably, the text introduces a discrete discussion of this matter with the boldfaced heading “Legitimacy Is the Main Objective.”17 The broad directive for fulfilling the pacification mandate indicates an aspiration toward a twisted version of Gramscian hegemony: “counterinsurgents achieve [pacification] by the balanced application of both military and nonmilitary means.”18 Accounting for the fact that hegemonic consent is not possible under conditions of conquest, occupation, or displacement, the strategic goal of legitimacy—a term that must be distinguished from both hegemony and consent—relies on reformism as a technology of policing. To clarify, i am not merely thinking of reforms to the police in this instance, but am conceptualizing the full cultural, political, aesthetic, and infrastructural apparatus of reformism as a marshaling of police power that includes and exceeds the discrete institution of the police. Alongside the immediately recognizable counterinsurgency protocols of infiltration, assassination, and blunt military/police force, Field Manual 3-24 outlines a strategy of reformist triage that ostensibly addresses the material conditions underlying occupied/policed peoples’ revolts: [K]illing insurgents—while necessary, especially with respect to extremists—by itself cannot defeat an insurgency. Gaining and retaining the initiative requires counterinsurgents to address the insurgency’s causes through stability operations as well. This initially involves securing and controlling the local populace and providing for essential services. As security improves, military resources contribute to supporting government reforms and reconstruction projects.19 This passage extends a strategic narrative that draws lessons from the US state’s protracted, multifront response to Black radical, liberation, and revolutionary movements during the mid-to-late twentieth century. As Robert Allen details in the classic study Black Awakening in Capitalist America, a coalescence of philanthropic foundation executives, elected politicians, police officials, academics, opportunistic community-based liberal reformers, and other counterinsurgent actors played a central rather than corollary role in institutionalizing the suppression of domestic Black radicals and revolutionaries during the late-1960s and 1970s. Describing an opening scene in this period of reformist counterinsurgency, Allen shows how Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy averred his organization’s involvement in the orchestration of a national agenda that in contemporary terms might be described as a philanthropic “social justice” commitment. Speaking at the annual banquet of the National Urban League in 1966, Bundy revealed to banquet attendees that the Ford Foundation, the biggest foundation in the country, had decided to help in the task of achieving “full domestic equality for all American Negroes.” This announcement came as no immediate surprise to Bundy’s hearers. For some time the foundation had been involved in efforts to upgrade [B]lack higher education, and it had given money to Urban League projects in the field of housing … . What the Urban League delegates and the American public did not know was that the gigantic Ford Foundation, which had already fashioned for itself a vanguard role in the neocolonial penetration of the Third World, was on the eve of attempting a similar penetration of the [B]lack militant movement.20 Here it is worth re-emphasizing that the rise of such domestic philanthropic initiatives cannot be disentangled from the broader strategic and tactical network of state-organized and state-condoned political/cultural repression that targeted organizations like the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, Robert and Mabel Williams’ chapter of the NAACP in North Carolina, the post-1964 iteration of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and other Black radical groups during this period.21 In fact, this ensemble of pacification is a relatively durable one that is overtly endorsed by Counterinsurgency: [C]ounterinsurgents typically have to adopt different approaches to address each element of the insurgency. For example, auxiliaries might be co-opted by economic or political reforms, while fanatic combatants will most likely have to be killed or captured.22 If ongoing and emerging movements in the first quarter of the twenty-first century are refusing the normalization and long perpetuity of police violence, terror, and gendered antiblack killings, then the US Army’s Field Manual would properly characterize them as an “insurgency,” and its most militantly committed participants as domestic “insurgents.” The US state’s mobilization to create a counterinsurgent “learning environment” has and will continue to rely on a combination of state and extra-state strategies to circulate waves of police reform messaging through the efforts of elected officials, philanthropic foundations and nonprofit organizations, schooling, and educational institutions, corporations, industrialized professional sports, and religious leaders, among others. Echoing Geo Maher’s assertion that “police reform has been largely successful in its own task: to legitimize the police,” Schrader suggests that such reform has historically “aimed to bolster the legitimacy of the institution and rehearse new modes of regulating and producing social order.”23 A stream of counterinsurgency thus works through both “reform” and “reformism,” terms that are often conflated but which require clear practical and conceptual differentiation. For the sake of clarity, it is helpful to conceptualize “reform” as a logic of institutional maneuvering rather than a discrete agenda or outcome. It represents an approach to social change that concedes the existence of prevailing social, economic, political, and/or legal systems, including those organized through the power of antiblack, racial capitalist, colonial, apartheid, and other violently oppressive (anti-)social forms. Agitating for reform within such systems entails identification and adjustment of relatively isolated aspects of their operation, often for the announced purpose of increasing (perceptions of) access and equity in their administration and everyday functioning: think voting rights reforms, police training and hiring reforms, and criminal justice policy reforms (e.g., the emblematic Obama era reform of sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine possession).24 In many cases, the purpose of a given reform is to protect systems against collapse, whether caused by internal contradiction and dysfunction or external forces of opposition. “Reformism,” on the other hand, is a militant ideological and political position that is often sanctioned by a combination of state power and the institutions that constitute gendered racial capitalism, including those encompassed in the formation of the nonprofit industrial complex that Allen’s 1969 study so astutely anticipated at the time of its publication. Reformism militantly stakes the claim that the cultural and political ensemble—including the epistemological structure—of an existing order ought to be protected, legitimated, and sustained rather than transformed, abolished, or creatively disrupted. As a defense of the existing order, the reformist position may passively and/or actively criminalize and endanger those people, communities, and movements that seek fundamental—that is, radical, abolitionist, anti-colonialist, or revolutionary—change to an oppressive arrangement. As Erica Edwards has demonstrated, reformism often pivots on gendered racial performances of (Black) respectability, which often induce or converge with cultural logics of commodification and racial fetish as well as entrepreneurial (neoliberal brand building) opportunism.25 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, reformism attempts to delimit the imaginative horizon of political possibility to that which is seen as achievable within the protocols and power relations of existing institutional forms.

Drawing on the intellectual production of twentieth-century Black anticapitalists, I theorize modern U.S. racial capitalism as a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation.14 The racial here specifically refers to Blackness, defined as African descendants’ relationship to the capitalist mode of production—their structural location—and the condition, status, and material realities emanating therefrom.15 It is out of this structural location that the irresolvable contradiction of value minus worth arises. Stated differently, Blackness is a capacious category of surplus value extraction essential to an array of political-economic functions, including accumulation, disaccumulation, debt, planned obsolescence, and absorption of the burdens of economic crises.16 At the same time, Blackness is the quintessential condition of disposability, expendability, and devalorization. [Footnote 14]: Another feature of modern U.S. racial capitalism is property by dispossession. In Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory, Robert Nichols draws on the experience of Indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand to theorize how the “system of landed property” was fundamentally predicated on violent dispossession. While the Anglo-derived legal-political regimes differed in these localities, the “intertwined and co-constitutive” material effects converged in the legalized theft of indigenous territory amounting in “approximately 6 percent of the total land on the surface of Earth.” Such dispossession, Nichols notes, is recursive: “In a standard formulation one would assume that ‘property’ is logically, chronologically, and normatively prior to ‘theft.’ However, in this (colonial) context, theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated: hence its recursivity. Recursive dispossession is effectively a form of property-generating theft.” As such, theft and dispossession, through property regimes, are an ongoing feature of the Indigenous reality of modern U.S. racial capitalism. Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 50–51. [End Footnote 14] My operationalization of capitalism follows Oliver Cromwell Cox’s explication in Capitalism and American Leadership.17 Modern U.S. racial capitalism arose in the context of the First World War, when, as Cox explains, the United States took advantage of the conflict to capture the markets of South America, Asia, and Africa for its “over-expanded capacity.”18 Cox further expounds upon this auspicious moment of ascendant modern U.S. racial capitalism thus: By 1914, the United States had brought its superb natural resources within reach of intensive exploitation. Under the stimulus of its foreign-trade outlets, the financial assistance of the older capitalist nations, and a flexible system of protective tariffs, the nation developed a magnificent work of transportation and communication so that its mines, factories, and farms became integrated into an effectively producing organism having easy access to its seaports.… [Likewise,] further internal expansion depended upon far greater emphasis on an ever widening foreign commerce.… Major entrepreneurs of the United States proceeded to step up their campaign for expansion abroad. The war accentuated this movement. It accelerated the growth of [modern] American [racial] capitalism and impressed upon its leaders as nothing had before the need for external markets.19 Relatedly, Peter James Hudson argues that the First World War fundamentally changed the terms of order of international finance, allowing New York to compete with London, Paris, and Berlin for the first time in the realm of global banking. This was not least because the Great War “drastically reordered global credit flows,” with the United States transforming from a debtor into a creditor nation.20 In addition to Latin American and Caribbean nations and businesses turning to the United States for financing and credit, domestic saving and investment patterns were altered to the benefit of imperial financial institutions like the City Bank.21 Although the United States is, to use Cox’s terminology, more a “lusty child of an already highly developed capitalism” than an exceptional capitalist power, the nation perfected its techniques of accumulation through its vast natural wealth, large domestic market, imbalance of Northern and Southern economies, and, importantly, through its lack of concern for the political and economic welfare of the overwhelming masses of its population, least of all the descendants of the enslaved.22 Modern U.S. racial capitalism is thus sustained by military expenditure, the maintenance of an extremely low standard of living in “dependent” countries, and the domestic superexploitation of Black toilers and laborers. Cox notes that Black labor has been the “chief human factor” in wealth production; as such, “the dominant economic class has always been at the motivating center of the spreads of racial antagonism. This is to be expected since the economic content of the antagonism, especially at its proliferating source in the South, has been precisely that of labor-capital relations.”23 In a general sense, racial capitalism in the United States constitutes “a peculiar variant of capitalist production” in which Blackness expresses a structural location at the bottom of the labor hierarchy characterized by depressed wages, working conditions, job opportunities, and widespread exclusion from labor unions.24 Furthermore, modern U.S. racial capitalism is rooted in the imbrication of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism. Anti-Blackness describes the reduction of Blackness to a category of abjection and subjection through narrations of absolute biological or cultural difference; ruling-class monopolization of political power; negative and derogatory mass media propaganda; the ascent of discriminatory legislation that maintains and reinscribes inequality, not least various modes of segregation; and social relations in which distrust and antipathy toward those racialized as Black is normalized and in which “interracial mass behavior involving violence assumes a continuously potential danger.”25 Anti-Blackness thus conceals the inherent contradiction of Blackness—value minus worth—obscuring and distorting its structural location by, as Ralph and Singhal remark, contorting it into only a “debilitated condition.”26 Antiradicalism can be understood as the physical and discursive repression and condemnation of anticapitalist and/or left-leaning ideas, politics, practices, and modes of organizing that are construed as subversive, seditious, and otherwise threatening to capitalist society. These include, but are not limited to, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, peace activism, and antisexism. Anti-Blackness and antiradicalism function as the legitimating architecture of modern U.S. racial capitalism, which includes rationalizing discourses, cultural narratives, technologies of repression, legal structures, and social practices that inform and are informed by racial capitalism’s political economy.27 Throughout the twentieth century, anti-Blackness propelled the “Black Scare,” defined as the specter of racial, social, and economic domination of superior whites by inferior Black populations. Antiradicalism, in turn, was enunciated through the “Red Scare,” understood as the threat of communist takeover, infiltration, and disruption of the American way of life.28 For example, in the 1919 Justice Department Report, Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes, As Reflected in Their Publications, it was asserted that the radical antigovernment stance of a certain class of Negroes [Black people] was manifested in their “ill-governed reaction toward race rioting,” “threat of retaliatory measures in connection with lynching,” open demand for social equality, identification with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and “outspoken advocacy of the Bolshevik or Soviet doctrine.”29 Here, anti-Blackness, articulated through the fear of the “assertion of race consciousness,” was attached to the IWW and Bolshevism—in other words, to anticapitalism—to make it appear even more subversive and dangerous. Likewise, antiradicalism, expressed through the denigration of the IWW and Soviet Doctrine, was made to seem all the more threatening and antithetical to the social order in its linkage with Black insistence on equality and self-defense against racial terrorism. In this way, “defiance and insolently race-centered condemnation of the white race” and “the Negro seeing red” came to be understood as seditious in the context of modern U.S. racial capitalism. The link between my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism and Robinson’s catholic theory of racial capitalism, beyond his “suggest[ion] that it was there,” is vivified through the prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who writes: “Capitalism…[is] never not racial.… Racial capitalism: a mode of production developed in agriculture, improved by enclosure in the Old World, and captive land and labor in the Americas, perfected in slavery’s time-motion, field factory choreography, its imperative forged on the anvils of imperial war-making monarchs.”30 Racial capitalism, she continues, “requires all kinds of scheming, including hard work by elites and their compradors in the overlapping and interlocking space-economies of the planet’s surface. They build and dismantle and reconfigure states, moving capacity into and out of the public realm. And they think very hard about money on the move.”31 Perhaps more than Gilmore, though, my approach aligns with that of Neville Alexander as described by Hudson.32 Like Alexander, who focused on South Africa, I offer a particularistic understanding of racial capitalism, mine being rooted in the political economy of Blackness and the legitimating architectures of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism in the United States. Gilmore qua Robinson offers a more universalist and transhistorical conception. Like Alexander, my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism is primarily rooted in (Black) Marxist-Leninists and fellow travelers. This is an important epistemological distinction: whereas Robinson finds Marxism-Leninism to be, at best, inattentive to race, my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism is rooted in the work of Black freedom fighters who, as Marxist-Leninists, were able to offer potent and enduring analyses and critiques of the conjunctural entanglements of racialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, on the one hand, and capitalist exploitation and class antagonism on the other hand.33 Although Robinson draws on scholars like Fernand Braudel, Henri Pirenne, David Brion Davis, and Eli Heckscher to understand European history, socialist theory, and the European working class, the work of Black Marxists like James Ford, Walter Rodney, Amílcar Cabral, and Paul Robeson offer me those same intellectual, historical, and theoretical resources. Finally, I agree with Alexander that the resolution to racial capitalism is antiracist socialism, not a cultural-metaphysical Black radical tradition. In what remains of this essay, I will draw on the work of Black Marxist-Leninists and anticapitalists to explicate the defining features of modern U.S. racial capitalism—war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, labor superexploitation, and property by dispossession. In this, I demonstrate that their critiques and analyses offer a blueprint for theorizing modern U.S. racial capitalism. War and militarism facilitate the endless drive for profit. Military conflicts between imperial powers result in the reapportioning of boundaries, possessions, and spheres of influence that often exacerbate racial and spatial economic subjection. War and militarism also perpetuate the endless construction of “threats,” primarily in racialized and socialist states, against which to defend progress, prosperity, freedom, and security. The manufacturing of conflict legitimates the mobilization of extraordinary violence to expropriate untold resources that produce relations of underdevelopment, dependency, extraversion, and disarticulation in the Global South. Moreover, the ruling elite and labor aristocracy in imperialist countries, not least the United States, wage perpetual war to defend their way of life and standard of living against the racialized majority who, because they would benefit most from the redistribution of the world’s wealth and resources, represent a perpetual threat. Here, Du Bois’s 1915 essay, “The African Roots of War,” is instructive.34 Though he does not directly analyze the United States, he nonetheless demonstrates how racism, white supremacy, and the plunder of Africa underpinned the capitalist imperialist war that engulfed the world from July 1914 to November 1918—a war that catapulted the United States into the center of the capitalist world system. Using Du Bois’s own words, Hubert Harrison, the father of Harlem radicalism, makes the direct link: But since every industrial nation is seeking the same outlet for its products, clashes are inevitable and in these clashes beaks and claws—armies and navies—must come into play. Hence beaks and claws must be provided beforehand against the day of conflict, and hence the exploitation of white men in Europe and America becomes the reason for the exploitation of black and brown and yellow men in African and Asia. And, therefore, it is hypocritical and absurd to pretend that the capitalist nations can ever intend to abolish wars.… For white folk to insist upon the right to manage their own ancestral lands, free from the domination of tyrants, domestic and foreign, is variously described as “democracy” and “self-determination.” For Negroes, Egyptians and Hindus to seek the same thing is impudence.… Truly has it been said that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the ‘Color Line.'” And wars are not likely to end; in fact, they are likely to be wider and more terrible—so long as this theory of white domination seeks to hold down the majority of the world’s people under the iron heel of racial oppression.35 For Du Bois, the imperialist rivalry for the booty on offer in Africa drove Berlin’s efforts to consolidate its place in the sun by displacing London in particular. While Vladimir Lenin understood that “the war [was] a product of half a century of development of world capitalism and of billions of threads and connections,” Du Bois expanded this analysis by providing a critique of the racial foundations of capitalist expansion.36 He held that the struggle to the death during the Great War for African resources and labor had begun to “pay dividends” centuries earlier through the enslavement of African peoples, the subsequent conflation of color and inferiority, and the reduction of what was routinely referred to as the “Dark Continent” to a space of backwardness ideally suited for dispossession. He further noted that “with the waning possibility of Big Fortune…at home, arose more magnificently the dream of exploitation abroad,” especially in Africa—a dream shared by white labor and the ruling class.37 In other words, this “democratic despotism” allowed for the white working class to “share the spoil of exploiting ‘chinks and niggers,'” and facilitated the creation of “a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor” that perpetuated racial capitalism across class lines.38 Moreover, this national unity was strengthened through the disrespect and dehumanization of the racialized toilers and peasants in the plundered colonies that mitigated the exploitation and impoverishment of the white working class in imperial countries. This superexploitation allowed white workers to get a share, however pitiful, of “wealth, power, and luxury…on a scale the world never saw before” and to benefit from the “new wealth” accumulated from the “darker nations of the world” through cross-class consent “for governance by white folk and economic subjection to them”—a consensus solidified through the doctrine of “the natural inferiority of most men to the few.”39 Given the entanglement of racialization and capitalist exploitation, Du Bois averred, “Racial slander must go. Racial prejudice will follow…the domination of one people by another without the other’s consent, be the subject people black or white, must stop. The doctrine of forcible economic expansion over subject people must go.” Insofar as this admonishment applied as much to the United States as to European imperialists, beyond the international proletariat, it was the darker peoples and nations of the world who would challenge racial capitalism, not least “the twenty-five million grandchildren of the European slave trade…and first of all the ten million black folk in the United States.”40 Imperialist accumulation denotes the rapacious conscription of resources and labor for the purpose of superprofits through violent means that are generally reserved for populations deemed racially inferior. On the precipice of the Great Depression, the prominent Black communist James Ford beautifully explicated imperialist accumulation. In his 1929 report on the Second World Congress of the League Against Imperialism, he explained that the extant political economy constituted the consolidation of Africa’s partition and the “complete enslavement of its people”; the arresting of its industrialization, which hindered the development of the “toiling masses”; and the relegation of the continent to a source of raw material, a market for European goods, and a dumping ground for accumulated surplus capital. In the U.S. South, the Black poor were dehumanized by Wall Street, “white big business,” and the “rising Negro [Black] bourgeoisie” whose condition of possibility was the subjection of the Black working class. This oppression was exacerbated by rigid racial barriers, disenfranchisement, and lynching. Ford further argued that the West Indies, subjected to U.S. militarism and occupation on behalf of Wall Street, were largely transformed into a marketplace for U.S. goods. Moreover, throughout Africa, the U.S. South, and the Caribbean, Black workers were impressed into forced labor, laying railroads, building roads and bridges, and working in mines; were entrapped on plantations through peonage; and were subjected to convict leasing. In addition, they suffered intolerable working conditions and routinized violence.41 Expropriation by domination designates the seizure and confiscation of land, assets, property, bodies, and other sources of material wealth set to work by relations of economic dependence. This relationship exists both between nations and between groups. A quintessential enunciation of expropriation by domination between groups is We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People, edited by the Black Communist William Patterson (with significant help from his wife and comrade Louise Thompson Patterson) and submitted to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress in 1951.42 The petition meticulously documented the past and present expropriation of Black people by the ruling class of modern U.S. racial capitalism through consistent and persistent discrimination in employment, unfair wages, forced ghettoization, inequitable and inferior accommodation and services, and the denial of justice in the courts. It further argued that this process was sustained by genocidal terror, white supremacist law, and the drive of monopoly capitalists for superprofits. Importantly, We Charge Genocide noted that, for primarily economic reasons, the historical and geographical locus of anti-Black genocide was the “Black Belt” of the Southern United States, a region expropriated by the Northern industrial capitalists and by Southern landowners alike. This was due in large part to plantation systems of sharecropping and peonage—legacies of slavery—in which Black political and economic rights were virtually nonexistent, Black laborers were inexorably tied to the land through debt, and the threat of violence and death precluded demands for justice. For Patterson, such expropriation by domination was the basis of “racist contamination that has spread throughout the United States.”43 We Charge Genocide further conveyed that expropriation by domination, a central element of modern U.S. racial capitalism, was more than a domestic concern because such practices “at home must inevitably create racist commodities for export abroad—must inevitably tend toward war.”44 Labor superexploitation can be understood as an economic relationship in which the intensity, form, and racial basis of exploitation differs little from slavery. Its effects are so extreme that it pushes racialized, particularly Black, labor effectively below the level of sheer physical subsistence. As Harrison explained, in the context of modern U.S. racial capitalism, Black workers “form a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group” because enslaved Africans were brought to the “new world” to be ruthlessly exploited. This reality fixed their social status as the most despised group, which in turn intensified their subjection.45 Likewise, organizations like the American Negro Labor Congress and the Anti-Imperialist League analyzed that the racial capitalist superexploitation of Black nations like Haiti in the first quarter of the twentieth century for the purposes of consolidating Wall Street control over land, commercial relations, and production was accompanied by the brutalization of Black labor, the export of Jim Crow practices, military occupation, and political repression.46 In effect, superexploitation results from the conjuncture of white supremacy, racialization, and the “badge of slavery,” which exacerbates the conditions of exploitation to which white working classes are subjected. As the Black Marxist Harry Haywood argued in 1948, “the stifling effects of the race factor are most strikingly illustrated by the drastic differences in the economic and cultural status of Negroes and whites.… Beyond all doubt, the oppression of the Negro, which is the basis of the degradation of the ‘poor whites,’ is of separate character demanding a special approach.”47 Superexploitation, he explained further, constitutes a combination of direct exploitation, outright robbery, physical violence, legal coercion, and perpetual indebtedness. It stifles “the free economic and cultural development” of the Black masses “through racist persecution as a basic condition for maintaining” virtual enslavement.48 The entrapment of Black women in domestic labor throughout the twentieth century—a function of their “triple oppression”—is perhaps the most glaring example of labor superexploitation under modern U.S. racial capitalism. In 1936, the lifelong Black radical Louise Thompson explained that Black women’s superexploitation in the capitalist mode of production was based on their race, sex, and subordination in the labor market.49 That same year, Black militants Marvel Cooke and Ella Baker published an article titled “The Bronx Slave Market” in which they studied triple oppression as it related to Black domestic workers. Cooke and Baker explained that the entanglements of racism, sex-based labor subordination, and structural poverty were deeply intensified by the Great Depression and forced Black domestic workers to pauperize their labor for the abysmal wage of less than thirty cents an hour. This form of labor exploitation was unique to the female sex because domestic work was conventional “women’s work,” and it was racialized insofar as the denigration of Black people fitted this group of women for low-wage, unprotected, and contingent labor.50

An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework.

We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions - decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants in Occupy Oakland and other settlers who want to know what decolonization will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can’t be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics - moves that may feel very unfriendly. But we will find out the answers as we get there, “in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give [decolonization] historical form and content” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36).

Because we are invaluable, we can never pay for ourselves. Nevertheless, we are required to pay. Incessantly we pay what can’t be paid. We pay, and pay, and pay, but not to own. Even our mothers, even our children, are not ours. We never come to terms, and this is too terribly beautiful for words. Our indebtedness is all we have, and all we have is what we owe to “one another.”

—Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Indent (to Serve the Debt)”

Carlos Rodríguez-Díaz has argued that instead of seeing efforts to support community survival and recovery from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as examples of resilience, these are better understood as forms of anticolonial resistance.12 Based in volunteer brigade work and rustic, do-it-yourself, communitarian approaches, as well as on a descaling of life in terms of lowering carbon footprint and reducing participation in mass consumer economies, independent feminist art collectives and small farms led by queer and transfeminist people in Puerto Rico have in some senses flourished in the interstices and margins of the state, even throughout the economic and ecological crises of recent years. But the paradigm of vulnerability and resilience is stretched thin by the likelihood of recurring and intensifying storms and social conditions characterized by a lack of access to health care and social services, extreme wealth polarization, and extensive interpersonal violence (including high rates of intimate violence and suicide).

The paradigm of vulnerability and resilience that reigns over the disaster-industrial complex dominated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and others is not sufficient to create conditions of livability.13 The ways Puerto Ricans lived both before Maria and after were and are themselves too destructive and too tied up with fossil fuels, throw-away commodities, and the corporate-driven destruction of the natural world. Resilience as a figure of return to a previous state of balance is impossible because the balance never existed. The crisis has always been with us. As Hilda Lloréns, in her critique of the notion of disaster capitalism asks, “When was capitalism not a disaster?” Lloréns’s work among coastal foragers in southeastern Puerto Rico shows that “their moral values and ideals of what it means to be successful in leading a good life [are] incongruent with middle and upper class values.” Coastal resources foragers (and, I would add, small farmers working through feminist agroecology models) “have built strategies to navigate and resist local and global crises” and “exercise their agency by crafting life affirming strategies that resist long-term oppressive systems, such as the racial capitalism with which Caribbean people have long grappled.”14 These are lives lived in between, flourishing in the cracks and fissures of colonial governance and epistemology despite antagonism and neglect from the government and state institutions.

But the state-centered discourse of crisis cannot offer a thorough accounting of the potential for decolonization in this historical time because crisis always already registers disorder as a problem of economy and proper governance. Seen in this way, disasters become opportunities for the financialization of resources and the securitization of the colonial state. But futurescapes in the middle Anthropocene contain moves we have not seen yet and may not know how to anticipate—modes of accumulating and dispersing life that are intertwined with but not entirely determined by political economic machinations or biopolitical exigencies. The stakes and scales of these debates are changing.

Decolonial Resurgence

To answer the first claim—that US rhetoric is the communication practice of organizing people and materials to serve the needs of the colonial settlement—I begin by looking at the Aristotelian tradition’s ongoing influence on the field. Aristotle’s rhetoric is a publicfacing procedure for persuasion within a subjected citizenry. Its objective: to find all means that might convince an audience, not because dialectic deliberation will not work, but because “affecting the decisions of juries and assemblies is a matter of persuasiveness, not of knowledge.” 1 Rhetoricians in the US still invested in Aristotle must account for this colonial carryover from Britain’s Aristotelian tradition. It represents particular forms of rhetorical criticism and pedagogical practices—like public speaking, debate, and oral defenses—that rely on a notion of subjective citizenship and sovereignty rooted in a colonial (then settler colonial) consciousness.2 Lauer argues, for example, that classical rhetoric was essential in propulsion of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. As a result of Augustus’s shift from deliberative to epideictic rhetoric, the Roman Empire was able to sustain the spread of Roman ideology onto lands that would have otherwise exceeded its authority.3 Augustus knew that the legitimacy of the Roman Empire was contingent upon the ability to shape public memory so that Roman law would be seen as morally virtuous. Thus, the rhetorical authority of sovereignty was used to justify the expansion of the Roman Empire as a function of the persuasive power of its leaders. Mary E. Stucky and John M. Murphy describe the way rhetorical authority is used, much like the Romans, to also remove native peoples from their stewarded lands for economic exploitation in the US.4 In both cases, rhetorical subjection and claims to sovereignty are communicated onto bodies and lands, exerting a discursive force that commits colonial violence. The practice of issuing rhetorical authority is intrinsically connected to colonial modernity. From Aristotelian thought to the middle of the twentieth century, “rhetorical criticism” focused almost exclusively on studying a speaker’s capacity to persuade publics through oratory.5 This meant that a training in rhetoric required studying “the texts of speeches delivered by the common and uncommon men who attempted to crystallize and mold public thinking about the issues of their day.” 6 The purpose of this training was not to disrupt existing systems of domination but, rather, to replicate them: as important as public address [is] itself in understanding [US] American culture is the character of the training in rhetoric provided by the nation’s colleges and universities. Rhetoric and rhetorical training … reflect to some extent the demands and expectations of the environment; the public image of the orator inevitably influences the collegiate training of future orators.7 Raymie McKerrow suggests that this tradition of training orators was reflected in the field up until the critical turn in the 1970s where scholars then begin to turn to rhetorical criticism of social justice movements and scholars like Maurice Charland and Michael Calvin McGee begin to rethink rhetorical subjectivity. McKerrow also credits Walter Fisher for work on narrative rhetoric, which McKerrow argues gave the field a language to study a “rational world paradigm” through narrative fidelity—though this “world paradigm” was certainly not inclusive of the indigenous narrative epistemologies already circulating for centuries before the arrival of European rhetoric.8 While McKerrow argues that the 1970s moved US rhetoric past its European colonial roots and into a postmodern scholarly practice, much of the field continues to be entangled with processes of settler colonial modes of production: invoking political subjectivities, authorizing sovereignty, and narrating the settler colonial consciousness.9 Notably, the “the rhetoric of modernity” is a structural process driven by the production of colonial subjects (i.e., Christian, white) and capitalist practices of production which originated in Europe and were spread throughout the Americas via genocide, occupation, enslavement, and war.10 Ultimately, the rhetoric of modernity is about the sovereignty constructed through a European ideological paradigm that was deduced from the rhetorical authority invented by monarchs, trade companies, and churches. Furthermore, that sovereignty exerted over colonial subjects relies on a distribution of settler colonial narratives that exist on a trajectory that has not quite finished the settler colonial project; settling for rhetorics of liberal modernity simply “crucially contributes to blocking out indigenous peoples’ struggles for a post-settler colonial future.” 11 Thus, it is not enough to say that rhetoric is “the study” of how settler colonial ideology is communicated. Rather, it is a specific public-facing communication practice that organizes people and materials (especially land) to serve the needs of a settlement through claims of political sovereignty. Furthermore, rhetoric produces and circulates narrative forms that foreclose a postsettler future by reproducing the same sets of relationships between bodies, lands, and power both in our research practices (as I will describe below) and in our pedagogies (like debate, public speaking, etc). Claim #2: assemblage theory frames rhetoric as an organizing logic Embedded within the theory of assemblages is a way to consider how communication moves ideological power onto bodies and throughout territories. Research on White Settler Governance (WSG) emerging from Canadian Cultural Studies reverberates Walter Mignolo and Lorenzo Veracini’s sentiment on the importance of studying the mechanisms of production behind settler colonialism. Scott Lauria Morgensen relies on a framework rooted in Foucault’s biopolitics and settler colonial studies to describe how WSG is founded by apparatuses of power that persist in producing populations and institutions that can reproduce settler logics: the biopolitics of settler colonialism will explain that the colonial era never ended … . Theories of the biopolitical state, regimes of global governance, and the war on terror will be insufficient unless they critically theorise settler colonialism as a historical and present condition and method of all such power.12 Settler colonialism, thus, is not simply a condition that afflicts native peoples and lands, but is a method settler states undertake in order to layer ideological structures of settler production like universities, hospitals, and courts onto yet settler-occupied territories. I argue that this is a communicable method. Patrick Wolfe suggests WSG organizes and endures through material mechanisms of ideological replacement, those that eliminate native peoples from lands and then occupy those lands indefinitely: “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event … elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence … . Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” 13 What settler colonialism replaces, though, is the order of how sets of relations between lands, peoples, and ideologies are mapped out onto invaded territories. As a structure of settler ideological power—or what I refer to as an assemblage—WSG persist in territorializing native lands and eliminating native peoples through organizing logics of subjectivity and sovereignty circulated through narratives of settler logic. Conventional rhetoric’s “agonistic” emphasis on evaluating the efficacy of a given presidential address, congressional debate, or other communicative practice is inherently conservative, and thus settler colonial, for it positions the WSG status quo as a given; that is, when the organizing logics of settler colonialism are communicated effectively, this is “effective” rhetoric. Therefore, to frame rhetoric as the communicable organizing logics of WSG, a study of assemblages is warranted. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, assemblages are an “ad hoc logic” about the ways social formations rely on a combination of heterogeneous, material and human parts to create change.14 Assemblages are like self-replicating, overdetermined political machines where many seemingly random materials are arranged in a self-reinforcing fashion to produce and sustain a particular outcome. While Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of political desire is ultimately framed in the context of late capitalism, thinking through their conception of assemblage as it is moved by a settler colonial desire—a desire Mignolo asserts is dually capitalistic and genocidally white supremacist—warrants a discussion of how political ideologies of domination are assembled by rhetorical logics. For one, assemblages are not things, and they do not produce things; they are arrangements of things.15 Assemblages, though, do territorialize and code particular annunciations with an organizing logic. In this case, materials and bodies are arranged and mobilized on territories according to the logics of settler desire (resource extraction, labor extraction, and genocide), which has the dual effect of creating the conditions for settler logic to reproduce. For DeLanda, this point is particularly important: what one feels as an effect (or affect) from assemblages is the sense that territories are being reshaped and bodies recoded to be more conducive to the reproduction of the assemblage.16 This facet of assemblages intersects with the biopolitical study of WSG by explaining the ways ideological structures of power arrange racial and economic hierarchies in the service of producing the conditions by which settler colonialism can reproduce. The other facet of assemblage, and the one that pertains most to the study of rhetoric, is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the abstract machine. An assemblage comprises the abstract machine, the concrete (material) components, and the personae (bodies). The abstract machine is the organizing logic of an assemblage: “the condition of an assemblage is abstract because it is not a thing or object that exists in the world, but rather something that lays out a set of relations wherein concrete elements and agencies appear.” 17 Thus, the abstract machine of an assemblage organizes the materials (including and especially land) and personae of the assemblage in a way that their sets of relationships affect the flows of power toward a particular desire. In the case of WSG, the capacity to call settler colonial subjects into being, the capacity to make sovereignty claims over native lands, and the capacity to normalize this invasive process through religious or grand global political narrative is organized by the abstract machine of settler logic—or what I described earlier as rhetoric. The abstract machine layers power over bodies and lands in a way that reshapes them to reproduce structures of settler power. In other words, settler colonial governance is an assemblage of ideological power in North America that territorializes the lands stewarded by native peoples, codes the bodies of native, Mestizx, and black peoples as Other, and shapes rhetorical/communicable landscapes into spaces conducive to the reproduction of the settlement. Rhetoric is the organizing logic of this white settler assemblage that is continuously communicated (discursively and affectively) to arrange the relationships between settler bodies, native bodies, occupied lands, and technologies of occupation. These tenets of rhetoric are articulated in the organizational logic of settler colonialism. We cannot undo settler colonialism unless we confront the normalization of these logics and begin to rearticulate an anticolonial praxis-driven method for studying rhetoric. This work—if it assumes that conventional rhetoric is, in fact, the organizing logic of the settler colonial assemblage in North America—can undo our complicity as rhetoricians to reproduce settler colonialism.

For Alfred, colonial recognition politics serves the imperatives of capitalist accumulation by appearing to address its colonial history through symbolic acts of redress while in actuality “further entrenching in law and practice the real bases of its control.”11 As we have seen, over the last forty years Canada has recognized a host of rights specific to Aboriginal communities, including most importantly to land and self-government. Canada has always used this recognition, however, as evidence of its ultimately just relationship with Indigenous communities, even though this recognition continues to be structured with colonial power interests in mind. Simpson levels a similar charge against the more recent “turn to reconciliation” in Indigenous politics. “As reconciliation has become institutionalized,” writes Simpson, “I worry our participation will benefit the state in an asymmetrical fashion.”12 In Simpson’s view, the state’s approach to reconciliation serves to neutralize the legitimacy of Indigenous justice claims by offering statements of regret and apology for harms narrowly conceived of as occurring in the past, thus off-loading Canada’s responsibility to address structural injustices that continue to inform our settler-colonial present. In doing so the state can claim “that the historical ‘wrong’ has been ‘righted’ and further transformation is not needed.”13 In the end, the optics created by these grand gestures of recognition and reconciliation suggests to the dominant society that we no longer have a legitimate ground to stand on in expressing our grievances. Instead, Indigenous people appear unappreciative, angry, and resentful, as we saw in chapter 4.

The optics of recognition and reconciliation can also have a colonial impact on Indigenous subjects. For both Alfred and Simpson, settler-colonial rule is a form of governmentality: a relatively diffuse set of governing relations that operate through a circumscribed mode of recognition that structurally ensures continued access to Indigenous peoples’ lands and resources by producing neocolonial subjectivities that coopt Indigenous people into becoming instruments of their own dispossession. According to this view, contemporary colonialism works through rather than entirely against freedom: In the “new relationship,” writes Alfred, the “rusty cage [of colonialism] may be broken, but a new chain has been strung around the indigenous neck; it offers more room to move, but it still ties our people to white men pulling on the strong end.” Alfred’s concern here is that many Indigenous people, particularly those leaders and community organizers heavily invested in the colonial politics of recognition, have come to associate this externally imposed field of maneuver with freedom or decolonization itself.

The new Social Security plan has two mandates: “expanding” benefits while “strengthening” funds, according to Rep. Larson’s site about the proposal.

Expansions include the roughly 2 percent benefit increase, as well as a measure to prevent retirees from paying taxes on them. The new minimum benefit will also be set at 25 percent above the poverty line to provide more retirement income for some of the country’s lowest earners.

A border adjustment shifts the burden of a carbon tax from domestic production emissions to domestic consumption emissions. The border tax proposal from Sens. Cramer and Coons is not a border adjustment—it is a tariff on emissions from imports with no corresponding tax on goods produced and consumed domestically.

Table 2 omitted.

China said on Monday the European Union's plan to impose the world's first carbon border tax will expand climate issues into trade in violation of international principles and hurt prospects for economic growth.

The European Commission this month outlined plans to impose a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), or CO2 tariff, on polluting goods from 2026, forcing some companies importing into the European Union to pay carbon costs at the border on carbon-intensive products such as steel.

But many of these objections are misplaced. From the big picture point of view, the EU should embrace the economic and political implications of a deep decarbonization strategy that respects both the US’s and EU’s commitment to protecting workers. Reflexive objection to innovative trade and climate strategies will make it more difficult for nations to adopt domestic trade measures without undermining their commitment to workers, drive a wedge between allies jointly committed to decarbonization, and undermine support for the global trading system that has helped spread global peace and prosperity to much of the world over the last 70 years. Providing members of environmental trading clubs preferential treatment over nonmembers is also a well-established practice. The best example is the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer–the most successful environmental treaty ever. Article 4 of the Montreal Protocol requires members to ban trade in controlled ozone-depleting substances with nonmembers. Members, however, are subject to an internal compliance process that is more forgiving while still holding out the possibility of trade-related measures for consistent noncompliance. This system gives states an incentive to join the international agreement and work toward the environmental goals it establishes, rather than remain outside the international agreement. In short, distinctions among members and nonmembers create incentives for cooperation over time that can produce greater environmental benefits. At a more granular level, these objections also misunderstand both European trade policy and international trading rules. With respect to the former, the EU has already shown that it is willing to compromise on its application of the most-favored nation principle in the name of addressing climate change. The EU CBAM provides an exemption for non-EU members that either 1) participate in the EU ETS,4 or 2) adopt a carbon trading system and link it to the ETS. Basing CBAM exemptions on whether members join the EU’s ETS either outright or practically both converts the CBAM into a form of climate club and likely violates the most-favored nation obligation. More importantly, though, it is the exact same tactic that the United States has proposed the GASSA use. Both the US GASSA proposal and the EU CBAM would accord preferential treatment to countries that have adopted certain domestic decarbonization policies.