Imperialism makes expansion and war with Russia an inevitability

The US has spent several trillion dollars over the past two decades in the Middle East, North Africa and West Asia. US interventions, from Libya, South Sudan and Somalia across to Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, have resulted in enormous costs and dubious advances. The results are meager except in terms of suffering. The US has spread chaos and destruction throughout Libya and Syria but failed to incorporate either into an enlarged empire. The Middle Eastern wars, initiated at the behest of Israel, have rewarded Tel Aviv with a sense of invulnerability and a thirst for more while multiplying and unifying US adversaries. Empires are not effectively enlarged through alliances with armed tribal, sectarian and separatist organizations. Empires allied with disparate, fractured and self-aggrandizing entities do not expand or strengthen their global power. The US has waged war against Libya and lost the political leverage and economic resources it enjoyed during the Gaddafi regime. It intervened in Somalia, South Sudan and Syria and gained enclaves of warring, self-serving ‘separatists’ and subsidized mercenaries. The war in Afghanistan, the longest in US history, is an unmitigated military disaster. After seventeen years of warfare and occupation, the US is holed up in the walled enclaves of the capital, Kabul. Meanwhile, the puppet regime feeds on multi-billion-dollar monthly subsidies. Iraq is a ‘shared’ imperial outpost—the result of fifteen years of military intervention. Kurdish clients, Sunni-Saudi warlords, Shia militia, Baghdad kleptocrats and US contractor-mercenaries compete for control and a larger piece of the pillage. Every square meter of contested territory has cost the US 500 million dollars and scores of casualties. Iran remains forever under threat but retains its independence outside of the US-Saudi-Israeli orbit. The US geo-political map has been reduced to dubious alliances with Saudi Arabia and its micro-clients among the Emirate statelets—which are constantly fighting among themselves—and Israel, the ‘client’ that openly revels in leading its patron by the nose! Compared to the period before the turn of the millennium, the US imperial map has shrunk and faces further retrenchment. The US-NATO-EU Map Russia has reduced and challenged the US pursuit of a unipolar global empire following the recovery of its sovereignty and economic growth after the disaster of the 1990s. With the ascent of President Putin, the US-EU empire lost their biggest and most lucrative client and source of naked pillage. Nevertheless, the US retains its political clients in the Baltic, the Balkans and Eastern and Central European regimes. However, these clients are unruly and often eager to confront a nuclear-armed Russia, confident that US-NATO will intervene, in spite of the probability of being vaporized in a nuclear Armageddon. Washington’s efforts to recapture Russia and return it to vassalage have failed. Out of frustration Washington has resorted to a growing series of failed provocations and conflicts—between the US and the EU, within the US between Trump and the Democrats, and among the warlords controlling the Trump cabinet. Germany has continued lucrative trade ties with Russia, despite US sanctions, underscoring the decline in US power to dictate policy to the European Union. The Democratic Party and the ultra-militaristic Clinton faction remained pathologically nostalgic for a return to the 1990s’ Golden Age of Pillage (before Putin). Clinton’s faction was fixated on the politics of revanchism. As a result they vigorously fought against candidate Donald Trump’s campaign promises to pursue a new realistic understanding with Russia. The ‘Russiagate’ investigation is not merely a domestic electoral squabble led by hysterical ‘liberals’. What is at stake is nothing less than a profound conflict over the remaking of the US global map. Trump recognized and accepted the re-emergence of Russia as a global power to be ‘contained’, while the Democrats campaigned to roll back reality, overthrow Putin and return to the robber baron orgies of the Clinton years. As a result of this ongoing strategic conflict, Washington is unable to develop a coherent global strategy, which in turn has further weakened US influence in the EU in Europe and elsewhere. Nevertheless, the intense Democratic onslaught against Trump’s initial foreign policy pronouncements regarding Russia succeeded in destroying his ‘pivot to realism’ and facilitated the rise of a fanatical militaristic faction within his cabinet, which intensified the anti-Russia policies of Clintonite Democrats. In less than a year, all of Trump’s realist advisers and cabinet members were purged and replaced by militarists. Their hard-core confrontational anti-Russia policy has become the platform for launching a global military strategy based on vast increases in military spending, demands that EU nations increase their military budgets, and open opposition to an EU-centered military alliance, such as the one recently proposed by French president Emmanuel Macron. Despite President Trump’s campaign promises to ‘pull back’, the US has re-entered Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in a big way. The Trump shift from global containment and realism to rollback and aggression against Russia and China has failed to secure a positive response from either past or present allies. China has increased economic ties with the EU. Russia and the EU share strategic gas and oil trade ties. Domestically, the US military budget deepens the fiscal deficit and drastically threatens social spending. This creates a scenario of increasing US isolation, its futile aggression pitched against a dynamic and changing world. Conclusion The Trump remaking of the global empire has had uneven results, which are mostly negative from a strategic viewpoint. The circumstances leading to new clients in Latin America is significant but has been more than countered by retreat in Asia, divisions in Europe, turmoil domestically and strategic incoherence. Remaking global empires requires realism—the recognition of new power alignments, accommodation with allies and, above all, domestic political stability balancing economic interests and military commitments. The key shift from realism toward a recovered Russia to militarization and confrontation has precipitated the breakdown of the US as a unified coherent leader of a global empire. The US embraces prolonged losing wars in peripheral regions alongside destructive trade wars in strategic regions. It has budgeted vast sums on nonproductive activities while impoverishing state and local governments via sweeping tax ‘reforms’ that favor oligarchs. Global remapping now involves a volatile and impulsive US-driven empire incapable of succeeding, while emerging powers are immersed in regional power grabs. There is no longer a coherent imperial empire controlling the fate of the globe. We live in a world of political maps centered on regional powers and unruly clients, while incompetent, gossip-mongering politicians in Washington compete with an arrogant, benighted President Trump and his fractured regime.