Intervention through policy in the Middle East is another step in the ongoing process of enforcing capitalist rule globally, reinforcing the logic of endless accumulation and the grammars of racialized capitalism.

The immediate post-Second World War era saw a massive transformation in the politics and economies of Asia and Africa, as states struggled for independence from colonial rule and as US –and to a lesser extent its European allies– facilitated the capitalisation of the new states’ economies. This process of capitalisation depended primarily for its spread on the work of both transnational corporate actors and the local bourgeoisie, whether or not aligned with the Western Bloc or not. Transnational corporations were often backed by the force of former colonial and the new imperial powers. And the primary task in many of these newly capitalising economies was the establishment of physical and virtual infrastructures that would facilitate capitalist production, commodity extraction, and the circulation of goods and capital. The role of the US military in this process is less understood. It is now a truism that wars waged and won by the US and European powers were followed by economic and commercial contracts that benefited those powers. The militaries were seen as paving the way for such business transactions. What has been far less frequently commented upon and has been far less visible is that the peacetime overseas activities of the US military and its infrastructural power were fundamental in establishing a grammar of capitalist relations which introduced new modalities of economic management and administration to the newly capitalising countries. The most dramatic of these geoeconomic interventions has been the work of the US Army Corps of Engineers in the construction of both civilian and military communication and transportation infrastructures and forging a vast military machine in Saudi Arabia. The Corps brought with its construction projects a liberal capitalist dispositif: forms of regulation, contracting and sub-contracting, debt production, property acquisition, and standards of construction that provided an environment conducive to incorporation into capitalist networks and relations. This infrastructural power of militaries within a geoeconomic sphere brings into question our understanding of how power operates globally. Neat separations and conceptual boundaries between public and private, states and corporations, domestic and foreign, or civilian and military are all challenged by the geoeconomic work of the US Army Corps of Engineers in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. The activities of the Corps –not just in times of war but especially in peacetime– have been adjuncts to the work of corporations in crafting the grammar of global capitalism. This grammar has incorporated racialised regimes of labour, capitalist modalities of property ownership, an assemblage of laws, regulations, engineering standards, contracts and practices, and finally and most significantly a set of physical infrastructures that have facilitated the capitalisation of global economies. This geoeconomic role is distinct precisely because of the inextricability of notions of commerce and security; the co-imbricated relationship of the Corps not only with private firms (contractors, but also the parastatal ARAMCO), but also with the Saudi state itself, and the blurring of foreign/domestic boundaries when the Corps functioned as an agent of the Saudi state. Infrastructures and infrastructural power uniquely shed light on these blurred boundaries between heuristic binaries (public/private; state/corporation; domestic/foreign; civilian/military). Questioning these basic binary separations when studying organisations such as the US Army Corps of Engineer, and the role it has played overseas, will help us better understand how the fundamental scaffolding of our world has been erected; and the ways these often invisible infrastructures reproduce and reinforce a liberal capitalist world order.