Imperialist rebalance: America’s ‘KGB’ foreign policy line fortifies US imperialism’s global hegemony
By Rasti Delizo
January 8, 2022 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Today’s imperialist world system reflects a combined set of diverse crises sharpening the global order’s systemic contradictions. These inherently include the generalized and deepening crisis of the international capitalist economy, the deadly and unabating COVID-19 pandemic, rising regional and transregional political-security tensions driven by inter-imperialist competitions, and the catastrophic climate change emergency endangering humankind and its ecosystems. The consequence of this historical conjuncture of worldwide ruptures already poses a direct threat to the future of our universal humanity. Hence, the international working-class movement—led by progressive, Left and revolutionary socialist forces—is now urgently tasked to overcome the multiple crises of capitalism by resolutely advancing the general struggle for world socialism.
This global setting imparts the context for this paper. The primary purpose shall be to try to further analyze American imperialism’s contemporary reactions to “rebalance” and “revitalize” itself amid a highly destabilized—and still deteriorating—international environment. The intent of this paper is to outline the emergent foreign policy principles, concepts and agenda which the United States is already beginning to pursue under the reactionary leadership of President Joe Biden’s regime. This is because Washington’s new global strategic outlook principally defines and shapes America’s current external aims and objectives. Therefore, my paper essentially highlights and underscores the newly revived aspects of US foreign policy’s material motives, fundamental scope and framework, and overall direction ahead.
Definitely, any additional understanding of US imperialism’s present course of action to fortify its global hegemony, can positively help to inform and guide the international revolutionary proletarian movement in developing highly effective forms of popular mass resistance battles to greatly damage and break the weakest links of the world imperialist chain at the level of national arenas of working-class struggles.
On the road to winning the historical mission of the proletariat—which is world socialist revolution—it becomes imperative to develop a further critical awareness of the rising reactionary and militarist thrusts of American imperialism. This is because the latter’s key external policy designs and schemes are not only aimed at neutralizing its major great power competitors at the present time—both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation. But more so, US imperialism’s ultimate target in the longer term is the world’s masses of working people, specifically the organized forces of the international working-class movement, in order to protect and preserve the bourgeois world system. This is crucially important to be grasped by the socialist forces, as Washington perpetually seeks to fully safeguard its enduring superpower status and global strategic interests at all cost.
Toward this end, the United States is clearly bolstering its external relations posture on the world stage. US imperialism’s central goal is directed at a global rebalance to revitalize its dominant influence and control across key domains of the international milieu—economic-political-diplomatic-security-health-climate-technological-cyberspace-cultural. In enhancing this foreign relations approach, the US is equally renewing its geostrategy to secure a dominating edge in global affairs for itself. Undeniably, this foreign policy track is centered on reasserting America’s predominance over a world environment largely characterized by a capitalist disequilibrium. And so, as the world situation jeopardizes American imperialism’s future balance, Washington is by now maneuvering to ramp up its global strategic agenda via a revitalized foreign policy line with a renewed geostrategic approach.
America’s ‘KGB’ foreign policy line
To enhance its imperialist rebalance, the United States is drawing from its own diplomatic and national security past in order to recharge for its future foreign policy drives. In fact, the Biden regime recently launched a newly designed foreign policy line and framework whose scope goes far beyond the parameters of its previous two-decade-long ‘Global War OF Terror’ (GWOfT) crusade post-9/11. Over the coming years, Washington’s renovated foreign policy stance will chiefly be geared toward a maximized recovery and accumulation of super-profits for the American capitalist ruling-class, while enhancing its intrinsic national powers. All the same, this unfolding process marks a glaring shift in the latest doctrinal development of US foreign policy.
Indeed, this ideologically-driven external relations perspective will force US foreign policy planners to incessantly push for the expansion of a global redivision of labor. For America’s foreign policy community, the urgent need to stabilize global market dynamics for the assured economic growth of American capitalism can be advanced, either through the world’s existing neoliberal model of capitalist exploitation or, via neo-Keynesian lines propagating state-based planning, regulatory and investment policies. But regardless of its options for any capitalist development onward, US imperialist foreign policy will always stand for the guaranteed protection of the core interests of America’s monopoly-bourgeoisie and, for the permanence of its rule over the capitalist world system.
Thus, America’s present-day foreign policy direction is guided by a rejuvenated set of external relations precepts previously advocated by three Cold War-era US national security advisers who all epitomize American imperialism’s geostrategic thinking. Accordingly, their earlier ideas and thoughts continue to proffer the US foreign policy-national security apparatus with the following conceptions to help Washington break out from its dilemma: a) To effectively protect and advance America’s core strategic interests by maintaining a balance of power in international relations through the dominant role of US-led alliances; b) To actively pursue political warfare via gray-zone tactics to manipulate and sway global public opinion in support of US foreign policy goals and aims; and, c) To dominate the Eurasian landmass with a comprehensively integrated strategy to decisively influence and control the Eastern Hemisphere—the largest hemisphere on earth terrain-wise—for America’s global primacy.
These key dictums characterizing American imperialism since the start of the Cold War, correspondingly reflect a troika of mindsets of some of America’s foremost national security and foreign policy elites namely, Henry Kissinger (1969-75), Gordon Gray (1958-61) and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1977-81). As former national security advisers, and once at the top echelon of the US foreign policy community, they were principally involved in designing, crafting and executing America’s belligerent schemes in the latter half of the last century, chiefly against the former Soviet Union. And now, in the third decade of the 21st Century, a synergized external relations approach, employing the major strategic concepts exemplifying the Kissinger-Gray-Brzezinski principles and thrusts, is America’s new ‘KGB’ foreign policy line.
To understand Washington’s current world outlook and strategies under Biden, America’s KGB foreign policy doctrine (and its subsequent course of action) needs to be comprehended. This is very significant as the KGB line is now aimed to thwart and overcome wide-ranging threats to the US’s external strategic environment altered by the post-pandemic global disorder. And with this anticipated scenario, we should expect the international order to drastically shift once again, and become reordered under more volatile circumstances.
Firstly, Kissinger’s realist international relations standpoint views the world order operating in an anarchistic manner. To prevail, the US must guarantee its underlying national interests by permanently maintaining a global balance of power to America’s advantage. As such, Washington has to constantly build and secure for itself an array of major—yet conditionally flexible—international alliances under Washington’s decisive and perpetual leadership.
Through this global design, the US ensures its comprehensive control over the international order and community. It shall do so by continuously intervening in world affairs—economically, politically, diplomatically, culturally, technologically, and militarily. Simultaneously, American imperialism will relentlessly strive for domination over a substantial majority of the earth’s space, populace and natural resources, specifically through its hegemonic spheres of influence and dominance. Consequently, the worldwide architecture of interlocking webs of US-led capitalist alliances will play a central role in reshaping the general parameters and facets of the global arena for the ultimate protection of America’s core strategic interests.
Secondly, a focal tenet of Gray’s is anchored upon the prime employment of a “psychological strategy” to purposefully manage overall US foreign policy. Accordingly, political warfare will fully be planned for, developed, coordinated, and operationalized within America’s broad external relations framework. This is to be pursued primarily through an integrated range of gray-zone tactical measures based on disinformation campaigns, economic pressures, political manipulation, and often, in selective combination with covert direct actions—but at a threshold level just below all-out military conflict. Precisely, Washington shall readily apply these externally-directed political warfare schemes to coerce and persuade its foreign allies and neutral states to continuously bow to America’s global priorities at any opportunity.
And third, a pivotal counsel of Brzezinski’s is already an ascendant urgency among senior US foreign policy planners. According to the ex-NSA’s leading precepts, America must always drive forward a geostrategy that projects its inherent strengths and powers globally. This is to vitally preserve the customary stability of the capitalist international order, in alignment with core US principles and interests. And to successfully secure its worldwide predominance, the US should strategically influence and control the immense transregional Eurasian zone—the same terrestrial realm which geographically encompasses both China and Russia. Moreover, because Brzezinski’s geostrategic guidance presupposes the need to pursue and enhance this area-focused external relations track, a key task here is to expand and deepen US-led alliances all across the Eastern Hemisphere in support of Washington’s shifting foreign affairs objectives and conforming narratives.
From a geopolitical perspective, this critically explains Washington’s intensifying rivalry targeting the alliance forged between Beijing and Moscow. Indeed, the China-Russia strategic partnership concretely reflects a common defense of their Eastern Hemisphere-based interests from America’s dangerously threatening probes and malign intentions within the area. And certainly, the unified objective of the Sino-Russo duo is to directly counter and neutralize US imperialism’s intensifying bellicose strategy.
Undeniably, US imperialism’s cardinal nature will continuously push it to advance the KGB paradigm as a reaction to the global order’s continually fluctuating strategic environment. Accordingly, American foreign policy will necessarily be compelled to accelerate its assaults across the world. In a sweeping manner, this means building more robust transregional economic and defense-based alliances to broaden and boost its spheres of influence, instigating political warfare campaigns and initiatives to keep the global community aligned behind Washington’s leadership, and spearheading assertive and aggressive actions throughout the Eurasian heartland, and the vast Asia-Indo-Pacific land-maritime corridors, to rule over the Eastern Hemisphere.
The general framework and application of the KGB line
From its viewpoint in the White House, the imperialist Biden regime’s basic outlook essentially sees two sources of clear threats to the prospective stability of the United States. Internally, Washington is directly troubled by America’s lingering economic difficulties (i.e., inflationary surges, weak industrial output, pandemic-induced unsustainable employment, excessive public debt levels, etc.) fused with growing political instability (i.e., a fragile social cohesion, increasing inequality, widening racism, disunity within the US Congress, etc.). And externally, the US is greatly alarmed by China’s bolstered and competing economic-diplomatic-military power stabs throughout the world. Linked to this, America is also seriously disturbed and threatened by the consolidating strategic partnership between China and Russia concerning vital areas of the Eastern Hemisphere, especially across the vast Eurasian landmass and its surrounding frontier-zone.
Without a doubt, American imperialism steadily locked its diplomatic target sights on China for over the past decade, even before Biden entered the White House. Yet by February 2021, the US deliberately and officially declared and classified the People’s Republic of China as its “long-range strategic competitor”. Further, America blatantly stated that China has the “aspiration to challenge the United States globally,” particularly in the realm of world affairs. And with this stark foreign policy stance, the Biden regime formally fashioned Beijing into its newest and latest global enemy since World War II.
In view of clear and present dangers to America’s inclusive security and wellbeing, US imperialism is constrained to immediately counteract and surmount its perceived domestic and foreign threats by addressing and connecting both national matters of concern through an overarching policy framework with a conscious global strategic outlook.
Thus, American imperialism’s new global policy agenda emanates from the principal doctrines of its KGB line. Fundamentally, this foreign policy framework comprises three main elements, namely: a) Global Strategic Infrastructure; b) Global Strategic Approach; and, c) Global Strategic Concentration. And for this line to have its desired effect, all three elements will have to be brought to bear synchronously by Washington.
The KGB line’s Global Strategic Infrastructure is to be concretely built upon a worldwide network of existing international, regional and multilateral alliances some of which have been in place since the Cold War period. This architecture of alliances—mainly along economic and security tracks—will be expanded on region-wide dimensions, while additional area-based pacts are to be formed under America’s imperialist leadership, control and guidance. In truth, Biden himself publicly promised to create more US-led transnational and transregional formations involving its traditional allies and other friendly countries. His goal is to augment a “rules-based international order” on a global scale—in other words, solidifying the international order along bourgeois-democratic values, norms and standards.
In application, US imperialism will operate to maximize its innate strengths and potencies through its hegemony over key regional alliances and multilateral groupings for its own ends. This would basically include, among others, the EU (European Union), NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), G7 (Group of 7), G20 (Group of 20), APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), EAS (East Asia Summit), OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), MESA (Middle East Strategic Alliance), Five Eyes alliance, Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-United States), IMF (International Monetary Fund), World Bank, and the WTO (World Trade Organization).
Although Washington does not have a total and absolute control of these international formations, it maintains a prevailing authority over and within them—and of course, America will never flinch at manipulating them for its own imperialist machinations. For example, to accelerate its KGB line, Washington seeks to compel more regional states to join the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—a collective security alliance comprising Japan, Australia and India—to directly confront the Sino-Russo alliance across the Asia-Indo-Pacific. And over the past months, America’s aggressively escalating anti-China crusade has already conclusively pressured the Philippines to reaffirm the 1998 RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA). Thus, Manila has only re-chained itself to Washington’s global war machine.
Coupled with this is the element of the Global Strategic Approach. This aspect of the KGB foreign policy framework is all about implementing and carrying out psychological strategy/political warfare—especially gray zone tactics—at the international level, to greatly amplify and boost the key global aims and interests of America. The essential features of this component are fundamentally in the form of tactical measures and activities to impress upon America’s external publics a particular policy-based narrative. The principal objective is to cause a shift in the attitude(s) and orientation(s) of global society so as to generate broader support for specific and/or general US foreign policy assertions and ventures.
Attaining this would necessarily embody a broad spectrum of calculated and pre-emptive schemes and ploys targeting identified foreign entities (both state and non-state actors). Such tactics will be unleashed in order to force the latter to inevitably bend to America’s global agenda and wishes. In clear operational terms, this takes various forms, including: ambushes, assassinations, blockades, bombings, coups d’état, cyber-attacks, deception, disinformation, economic corruption, foreign electoral interventions, invasions, low-intensity conflict, militarist aggression, sabotage, sanctions, tarnishing of selected political leaders/personalities, and many more anti-democratic methods. Though oftentimes, a blend of these tactical options are simultaneously employed versus America’s external targets.
Henceforth, the US is expected to heighten the execution of its political warfare actions to rebalance itself globally in the years and decades ahead. In fact, the international community continues to witness America’s wide range of unending aggressiveness toward states with self-declared ‘anti-US imperialist’ attitudes and postures. Undoubtedly, these targeted states include China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and many other countries.
The KGB foreign policy framework’s third element is that of Global Strategic Concentration. This involves the pursuit of a comprehensively unified range of planned activities and undertakings to attain American objectives concentrated on the Eurasian zone—the heartland of the Eastern Hemisphere. Presently, the determined focus of US foreign policy directed at Eurasia underpins and moulds America’s foremost geostrategy for obvious strategic reasons.
This is chiefly because the Eastern Hemisphere is home to over 80% of our planet’s humanity. It is also the larger of the globe’s two hemispheres land-wise, as it spans from the British Isles in the North Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Japanese archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. Additionally, it contains incalculable amounts of raw mineral resources and extensive energy reserves, and straddles many critically vital terrain and maritime routes of international trade. Likewise, more than 160 countries (of the world’s 196) are geographically located in the hemisphere. Truly, this is the principal reason why the great powers are contesting each other for ultimate dominance and control over the Eastern Hemisphere—for, whichever power bloc is able to mightily assert its grip over one-half of the globe will definitely secure for itself a strategic hegemony over planet Earth.
So expectedly, US foreign policy shall centrally concentrate its material and ideological endeavors and forays on Eurasia, as prescribed by the KGB line. Aligned with this, America’s geostrategy will also be geared to accomplish four hostile intents against the China-Russia axis: Deny-Disrupt-Degrade-Destroy. For US imperialism, the endgame for containing the firmly expanding powers and influence of both China and Russia calls for Washington to fairly destroy Beijing’s and Moscow’s unique capacities to generate and sustain their exceptional brands of national power. Although America will not aim for a total destruction of its strategic rivals, it will, nonetheless, wage endless struggles against the Sino-Russian alliance across various domains to effectively degrade their current levels of great power capabilities.
And to carry this out, the US will instigate relentless efforts to undermine and weaken China’s and Russia’s collaborative plans. By doing so, the former intends to disrupt and delay the latter’s common efforts at improving their present-day unities against America. This is, therefore, the underlying basis of the ‘Hemispheric Arc of Denial’—America’s sharply escalating geostrategy to effectively deny the China-Russia strategic partnership from greatly expanding its combined powers throughout—and beyond—the Eastern Hemisphere. Almost encircling the Eastern Hemisphere’s perimeter, the Hemispheric Arc of Denial is America’s geographic-based arc of security alliances containing US-controlled military bases, together with troops and pre-positioned weaponry, logistics and other war materiel, all aimed at China and Russia.
The KGB line’s course versus China
The American monopoly bourgeoisie is desperately intensifying its search for a way out of the multiple crises of world capitalism. Threatened and terrified by both its declining national capacities and worldwide standing, the United States is severely reacting to perceived strategic competitors within its external environment to regain its balance. In this manner, the US is outrightly intensifying its malign confrontation toward China on a broad range of crucial issues and concerns affecting the future of America’s superpower status. In particular, the comprehensive aspects of Washington’s rejuvenated foreign policy direction are now centrally aimed at suppressing Beijing’s swiftly ascending eminence as a global great power.
And so, in the execution of its KGB line across Eurasia, the US is heightening its efforts and maneuvers to extend and enrich its traditional spaces of influence and authority. Inexorably, America’s dominating ways within various regional economic and security alliances is already turning them into major sites and platforms of foreign policy struggles between Washington and its counterpart capitals in the area. By engaging the latter countries through its usually aggressive diplomatic method of ‘coerce-to-convince’, the US is further destabilizing the larger ambit of the Asia-Indo-Pacific region. In more specific terms, American imperialism is coercing regional states to inevitably choose sides in the spiraling Sino-American contention for strategic control of the Eastern Hemisphere.
America’s main foreign policy goal is to successfully contain the still growing China-Russia alliance before 2030. This is the year when China is expected to reach a level of relative strategic parity with America, according to a 2020 study on Beijing’s military power by the US Department of Defense. According to Washington’s foreign policy community and its leading strategic planners—including their Chinese equivalents—it is estimated that by the coming decade the PRC will be at such a far advanced level of development that, Beijing will be able to potentially match American power in the Asia-Indo-Pacific in terms of certain economic-political-diplomatic-technological-military attributes. These strategic assessments on China are also similarly reflected in the study of the 2020 Asia Power Index of the Lowy Institute (an Australian reactionary think tank).
Further reflecting these separate assessments, the report of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) 19th National Congress also outlines its own similar appraisals. The CPC’s plans for the PRC’s strategic national development for the coming decade is to fast-track the construction of China into becoming a “great modern socialist country” by 2050 (in anticipation of the PRC’s centennial on October 1, 2049). The material basis for such estimations are premised upon China’s Comprehensive National Power (CNP) index of key indicators.
The CNP is a measure of a nation-state’s general power at a particular time and helps to indicate its position/rank within the international system. The CNP’s indices include, Perceived power, Critical mass (population plus territory), Economic capabilities, Military strength, Strategic purpose, and the Will to pursue national strategy—and so, in formulaic terms, it is expressed as: Pp = (C + E + M) x (S + W). This approach to measuring a state’s national power was initially devised by Ray Cline, a former head of the Directorate of Intelligence of America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); it was further developed by China under Deng Xiaoping’s encouragement.
Therefore, in reaction to China’s rapidly developing comprehensive capacities and capabilities, America is scrambling to blunt Beijing’s sharpening powers. The US is indisputably rushing in to avert the PRC’s conclusive rise and transformation into a ‘great modern socialist country’ in the intermediate phase. And now panicked by Beijing’s mounting potencies to counteract US imperialism’s long-time transnational sway in the Asia-Indo-Pacific, America’s foreign policy community is vigorously rolling out its KGB line’s global offensive.
A clear example of how the KGB line operates was recently witnessed through the public launch of the AUKUS as, “a new enhanced trilateral security partnership.” Unveiled last September 16, the AUKUS markedly bears the customary imprint of a US-initiated design and schema to further project America’s brand of world leadership, while obviously protecting US imperialism’s global strategic interests from its declared universal adversary—the PRC. As one of Washington’s latest foreign policy initiatives, the AUKUS is set to operate as a collective security pact under US control. And unquestionably, its prime task is to effectively foil China’s growing endeavors and power projection.
This was the apparent and underlying message jointly announced by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Biden at their virtual-press launch. Together, they outlined their initial agenda for AUKUS within the coming months. A top priority is for Australia to immediately acquire a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines (but not nuclear-armed). Simultaneously, AUKUS will deepen defense ties with the ASEAN, including the Five Eyes intelligence network.
Nonetheless, a critical element of this imperialist thrust is the role of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue in boosting AUKUS—since the Quad (containing Japan, India and Australia) remains an American security mechanism for the region. Any advent of an AUKUS-Quad axis would certainly redraw the Asia-Indo-Pacific’s security architecture and equation. And of course, additional defense allies from across the area will make it the dominant collective security force versus the China-Russia bloc in this part of the world.
However, these dynamics will only undermine Southeast Asian stability, as various ASEAN countries will be compelled to join a redrawn US imperialist sphere of influence in the region. And this is already the case concerning the Philippines. Surely, by enlisting in America’s brand new militarist enterprise, Manila will merely act to serve Washington’s destabilization agenda for the region.
Thus, Southeast Asia and its adjacent transregional space will become endangered. The AUKUS-Quad thrusts will highly militarize the air-land-sea-cyberspace dominions of the Asia-Indo-Pacific, as neighboring states rush to join either camp. And as a heightened regional arms race ensues due to threatening actions and counter-actions, international instruments for protecting humanity from the spread of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons-based technology, including the promotion of nuclear disarmament, will clearly be violated. This alarming scenario is by now the actual case in terms of the long-time presence of the US Navy’s nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers operating in the Southeast Asian Sea (South China Sea), and beyond. Yet, this general condition demonstrably breaches both the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the 1995 Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ) Treaty.
Unmistakably, the fluidity and instability of the international strategic environment continues to deteriorate even more. This is not just because the two prevailing world powers of the present-day—the US and China—are escalating pressures upon each other. But, both sides are aggressively competing to alter the global division of labor to their own advantage via expansions of their own spheres of influence and domination. Washington and Beijing are separately striving to gain the allegiance of many countries lying within the zones of the semi-periphery and periphery of the imperialist-capitalist world system. And in this global setting, the two zones have already become vital battlegrounds for imperialist contestation and capture.
Hence, under the guidance of the fused and synthesized Kissinger-Gray-Brzezinski foreign policy doctrine, US imperialism is currently embarking on a firm course of action to safeguard its top position within the realm of the global capitalist economy by directly challenging China’s expanding clout and force through a geostrategy employing spheres of influence to execute political warfare throughout the immense Eurasia-Indo-Pacific region to attain an ultimate goal—America’s supreme dominance as a core power over the capitalist world system into the latter half of this century.
The KGB line’s prospective global impact
America’s essential global outlook is always ideologically driven, and its corresponding foreign policy goals are consistently premised on a direct intervention in international affairs. To achieve a successful outcome in this respect, US foreign policy is traditionally planned and crafted in terms of long-range strategic cycles framed in decades. It is basically determined by a set of strategic assumptions reflecting the world environment’s long-term trends and challenges. So given its national conditions, America perceives an existential threat to its historical and materially-rooted global standing at this time. Thus, the intensification of US imperialism’s rebalance—guided by the principles of its KGB line—must critically be understood and viewed as a mounting onslaught against the international order itself.
This leading trend, underlying the world’s modern social development, is sharply defining the new historical period. As an emergent transitional era unfolds, society starkly reveals the profound crisis of the worldwide system of capitalism. There is now an appearance of emerging changes in the world’s post-2020 economy which are beginning to affect the disposition of the class forces. This is causing the exacerbation of contradictions between nascent elements in social life and the outmoded socio economic-political system, including a growing awareness of these contradictions among individuals and the social classes. And certainly, all of these aspects and features are subsequently colliding to push forward a process toward a social revolution.
As Lenin put it, “It is in such periods that the numerous contradictions which slowly accumulate during periods of so-called peaceful development become resolved. It is in such periods that the direct role of the different classes in determining the forms of social life is manifested with the greatest force, and that the foundations are laid for the political ‘superstructure’, which then persists for a long time on the basis of the new relations of production.” On this point, Lenin further asserted, “A high appraisal of the revolutionary periods in the development of humanity follows logically from the totality of Marx’s views on history.”
Therefore, the prospects for social revolution in today’s global society is not surprising at all. For sure, American imperialism’s bid to rearrange the disordered international regime to its further advantage shall only be more disruptive of the current situation. With the US’s attempts to acutely regain its power balance in world affairs, an influx of global tensions and conflicts will clearly result from this reactionary course of action.
Throughout this distinctive transitional phase of world history, the international scale of contradictions, caused by the multiple crises of capitalism, will at some point heighten and converge to cause an even more explosive contradiction-tension-conflict dialectic. In fact, because some of the crisis dynamics already overlap, and are interconnected through the imperialist-led globalization structures and processes, any destructive aftermath can yet trigger a more generalized rupture of the global capitalist system, and its manifested world order. Within this highly precarious period of humanity’s history, which materially flows from the severely decaying monopoly capitalist epoch, the global situation will further witness the appearance of pervasive economic-social-political disruptions—including possible general international wars. And as an upshot, the advent of a rising wave of proletarian revolutions and bourgeois counter-revolutions will be the norm.
Even so, as the US pursues efforts to fully recover its declining superpower status within the international system, its global posture will increasingly take on a far more aggressive and brutal nature in the years to come. This is in relative contrast to the early Cold War years, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, when America strongly deployed its imperialist foreign policy line of ‘containment’ versus the Soviet Union-led Socialist Bloc. At the time, America was both the undisputed superpower victor of WW2 and the gravitational center of world capitalism. Nonetheless, during this same period, the Moscow-aligned international communist movement, and its ‘world anti-imperialist front’, had by then taken on a position of defending the progressive gains of world socialism by thwarting America’s provocative transglobal incursions.
Undeniably, the US was a highly belligerent global power in the second-half of the 20th Century. In containing alleged threats emanating from the Soviet Union, America then enjoyed a positive set of advantages at its disposal, than it does in countering China today. Key among America’s helpful factors during the Cold War were the following: a) The US was the international center of capitalism; b) The Soviet Union’s alliance with the PRC lasted for only a decade; c) The Western European states and NATO absolutely supported Washington’s foreign policy line of containment; d) American military might was at its peak with basically unrestrained annual defense budgets; e) The US maintained over 1000 military bases around the globe; f) Washington’s external influence across West Asia (the Middle East) was widespread and relatively stable; g) The US had a greater sway over many of the East Asian countries, due largely to its strategic gains and powerful resources after WW2; h) Washington retained a near-absolute dominance over the Western Hemisphere by fully exercising its Monroe Doctrine; i) American-made technology was far more superior than all of its adversaries combined; and, j) The potentials of the Eurasian landmass were not yet fully maximized by either the Soviet Union or China.
However, after more than seven decades—and beyond the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991—the international balance of power is once again changing. Even as the US remains the world’s top nuclear weapons-based great power, China is now being recognized by many as the global center of capitalism. This paramount gravitational shift in the economic dynamics of the world order signals significant problems which American imperialism needs to overcome in the period ahead.
Additionally, the earlier Cold War elements which were positive factors in enabling the US to win in opposition to the former Soviet Union are now either reversed or have disappeared from the stage of world history. A quick glance at the following negative conditional elements will bear this out: a) China is presently the gravitational center of world capitalism; b) The China-Russia ‘comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation’ is more than two decades old, and still improving; c) The member states of both the EU and NATO are not singly unified against Beijing; d) America’s annual defense budgets (as percentage of GDP) have steadily been decreasing since 2010; e) Economic and diplomatic constraints have closed down many US military bases worldwide (with only around 750 bases abroad as of July 2021); f) America’s general influence across West Asia drastically decreased since the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (it was further diminished after its defeat in Afghanistan last August); g) Many East Asian countries are closely engaged with China today, principally due to its fast-growing economic pull; h) Many Caribbean, Central and Latin American states have ‘turned Left’ and are pursuing anti-US imperialist foreign policies, especially those within the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) project; i) China is now a world leader in terms of high-technology development, and has already surpassed America’s hi-tech sector in various aspects; and, j) Both China and Russia now have a common understanding to maximize the strategic inter-connectivity potentials organic to the Eastern Hemisphere—this includes Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Maritime Silk Road (MSR) projects, together with Moscow-Beijing’s Arctic/Polar Silk Road initiative—thus, physically connecting seaports on both the North Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean through the Eurasian heartland and the Arctic.
Under these altered circumstances, America is racing to deny China from reaching a certain global power threshold. Along this line, Washington is escalating its globalized pre-emptive strike package involving economic-diplomatic-political-technological measures and actions aimed at Beijing (with Moscow as a strategically-related target). But, should China attain its own nationally-defined great power ascendancy sooner than later, US imperialism will, by that point in time, have no qualms at all in engaging Beijing in open military conflict. And definitely, this type of an international scenario is a bad nightmare for the entire world, to say the very least.
Thus, America now finds itself in the position of a declining great power that still wants to reclaim its long-held global supremacy. Obliged to react, the US will, however, find it harder this time around to counteract the PRC’s expansively advancing comprehensive national powers from an impaired position. So, in contesting China with its backside to the wall, American imperialism is becoming like a wounded tiger that is battling to survive—it will furiously fight back in a more ferocious and vicious manner, regardless of the costly aftereffects.
In this context, therefore, the ensuing global impact of Washington’s KGB foreign policy line should be deemed as a menacing threat to the world’s proletarian movement and its working masses. Hence, the socialist forces upholding the general line of revolutionary proletarian internationalism should promptly prepare to respond in worldwide unity and struggle. In the same way, they should resist and combat all of US imperialism’s universal provocations and reactionary plots against the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world.
Our socialist tasks amid the US imperialist offensive
The renewed global trajectory of US imperialism greatly risks the lives and future of the world’s millions of exploited working class masses, and the oppressed nations and peoples. This is an imminent reality as the American capitalist ruling-class speedily moves to stabilize the undermined ‘material social relations’ of America’s weakened socioeconomic formation. Certainly, American capital will undertake this through an external relations track predicated on linking America’s wellbeing and security to Washington’s lasting control of the international capitalist system. And surely in this regard, the KGB foreign policy line shall forcefully be executed as an overriding priority to further assure America’s own national survival.
The world’s colossal masses of humanity now face globalized conditions of extended destabilization, disorder and destruction. This extremely perilous scenario is merely a reflection of the multiple crises affecting the current international environment. These spiraling predicaments are all products of the systemic contradictions widely shattering the imperialist-ruled global order. Yet, the irrational features of the capitalist world system, which induce constant vulnerabilities in the lives of human beings, are steadily pushing huge numbers of people to directly confront their existing structural conditions of social life.
Amid this very setting, therefore, widespread mass movements and popular resistance struggles have lately arisen. They intensified almost simultaneously and swept the globe at the start of 2020—just weeks before the pandemic was declared in mid-March last year. Many of these class-based confrontations have been led by working-class movements, Left and revolutionary socialist forces. Even until this very day, this upsurge of worldwide mass struggles continues to grow in scope and number in all the regions of the world.
And just like the earlier mass protest movements of the last two decades, the basic character of the modern-day popular struggles throughout the post-pandemic period remain essentially the same. They are focused on condemning and denouncing neoliberal policies, the high cost of living, extensive unemployment, contraventions of social and economic rights, massive violations of human, civil and political rights, social injustice, regional inequalities, austerity measures, difficulties in accessing basic social services (i.e., healthcare, education, social security, etc.), graft and corruption, nepotism and cronyism, and increasing state-terrorism and repression targeting legitimate dissent and democratic protest actions.
These movements effectively represent the significant layers and prevalent segments of the working-class masses across many countries. They include, private sector employees, public sector workers, the precarious proletariat, the urban poor, elements of the impoverished and proletarianized petit-bourgeois classes, students, women, unemployed graduates, the rural proletariat and poor peasantry, and indigenous peoples. Their generalized motivations for mobilizing in protest against their reactionary states is connected to the rapidly deteriorating conditions of their daily lives. Repeatedly, the masses openly blame their own bourgeois governments for accepting and imposing anti-poor/people policies and measures ordered by international and multilateral financial institutions—and always, under imperialist dictates.
Despite varying levels of state repression, including militarized anti-COVID-19 lockdowns, the movements endure in popularizing, organizing and mobilizing the oppressed and exploited masses of working people in their millions around the world. The Left and revolutionary socialist forces are actively engaging with the accelerating struggles of the workers’ movements in recognition of, and in preparation for taking greater advantage of, the positive undercurrents that propel prospects for revolutionary social change. Potential systemic-change processes are mostly being underpinned by the emergent objective conditions, both internally and externally. The enormous impact of the explosive global situation, combined with the failing economic-social-political environments at the national-level, is becoming more favorable for the general advancement of the subjective forces. In reality, these dynamics are highly animating and motivating the revolutionary proletarian forces toward raising higher the degree and intensity of their mass struggles.
The working classes in bourgeois societies everywhere are actually experiencing a range of progressive potentials for their respective struggles. These are materializing and breaking out due to a sharpening of the international-national dialectics engendered by the post-2020 imperialist world regime. Because of this, the evolving objective conditions are becoming more auspicious for socialist ideas and policies to receive a broader acceptance by the working classes and the popular masses. Socialism is gaining greater attraction and attention these days because the oppressed and exploited classes face daily hardships, miseries and sufferings permanently instigated by bourgeois elite-rule. And amid their crumbling capitalist societies and environments, the social majority will become even more open to revolutionary alternatives and to the socialist path in the years and decades to come.
We must, therefore, advance our socialist line of march by carrying out certain principal tasks forward. All socialists are duty bound to propagate socialist propaganda as an utmost task. We have to absolutely provide a clear and systemic alternative to capitalism—while equally recognizing the concrete historical and material realities shaping our unique national arenas of revolutionary proletarian struggle. Additionally, the socialist forces must pursue ideological struggles aimed at the dominant bourgeois ideology, including the defeat of opportunist and reformist ideas confusing and poisoning the ranks of the working-class movements.
As the mass movements spontaneously develop, socialists must be ready and prepared to actively participate in their struggles. In this manner, we will be able to help determine the overall character, form and direction of the popular resistance. In so doing, we can primarily ensure that these mass struggles will have a socialist content at most and/or, a consistently democratic content at the very least. Likewise, the socialist forces must always try to attain, and to maintain, a vanguard role—or at the minimum, a key leadership position—within the major mass movements that are currently being organized and mobilized in our respective countries, including inside progressive regional and global alliances and movements.
Related to these central tasks, socialists must permanently seek ways to educate, organize and mobilize the working-class masses, together with the other oppressed and exploited social layers in our capitalist societies. They will need to be united and consolidated around significant class struggles targeting the capitalist system. In struggling to defend the economic and social rights and welfare of the working class, socialists must fight to defeat the imposed policies of imperialism, neoliberalism and fascism—so as to weaken, overpower and wipe out the bourgeois-class order. And in waging these revolutionary struggles, socialists should link them up with other progressive and radicalizing political and social forces to build broader and stronger alliances, coalitions and united fronts against the reactionary bourgeois-state—and its imperialist masters.
Furthermore, as we accumulate new forces and build our capacities, we must also develop all possible forms for our internationalist solidarity links and work with the world’s Left and revolutionary socialist parties and organizations. Together with this, we should also collectively improve upon our existing relations as Southeast Asian Left and socialist forces. Moreover, we should be able to positively reach out to other progressive, Left and socialist formations across the ASEAN region to eventually establish a more unified project of Southeast Asian socialists in the near future. And toward this objective, the principles of revolutionary proletarian internationalism must be our collective guiding light.
Lastly, the deepening and spreading ruptures inherent to the imperialist world system will prolong and expand US imperialism’s aggressive maneuvers and subverting actions throughout the globe. As America’s KGB foreign policy offensive heightens conflict throughout the international realm, an increasing number of capitalist states will further react by foisting more harmful right-wing policies on their societies and peoples—especially in the form of neoliberal and fascistic measures. And so, within this dire worldwide context, the international working-class movement and socialist forces must promptly create worker-led anti-imperialist and anti-fascist united fronts. Inevitably, these revolutionary proletarian political instruments shall help us to firmly smash all bourgeois and reactionary fetters to enable us to resolutely struggle forward for the ultimate seizure of state power—and hopefully, this will be in the near future.