Category: Military Intervention

Venezuela and the Imperialism of Great Power

3 January 2026

Stephen Gowans

The US attack on Venezuela and the abduction of its president with Washington’s avowed aim of “running the country” and “taking its oil” can be viewed on three levels: As the action of: 1) the Trump Administration; 2) US imperialism; or 3) great power. The level one selects is important, because it shapes what one believes needs to, or can, be done in response to the US aggression.

We can attribute the attack on Venezuela to the Trump Administration specifically, since it was the Trump White House that set the crime in motion. But inasmuch as the aggression is only one of scores of foreign aggressions the United States has undertaken in the last 135 years (since the end of the Indian Wars in 1890 and the closing of the US West, which saw the United States turn to expansion into the Western hemisphere and the Pacific), we might say that the problem of US aggression is not one of the Trump Administration alone, but of US imperialism generally. Some people argue that imperialism will only cease once the United States is brought down, as if the United States is the only country capable of dominating and exploiting other states.

I believe this perspective is too narrow (though it is vastly better than one that focusses on the Trump Administration, as if Trump’s foreign policy is an aberration.) Imperialist aggressions will not end with the end of the United States, since imperialism isn’t unique to the United States (or to the Trump Administration).

No single country, no single era, no single mode of production, is the progenitor of imperialism. Even Lenin, who many erroneously believe linked imperialism uniquely to monopoly capitalism, recognized that imperialism is a phenomenon as old as antiquity. “Colonial policy and imperialism existed before this latest stage of capitalism,” Lenin wrote in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism, “and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and achieved imperialism.” Lenin’s point about imperialism and capitalism’s latest stage, was that imperialism in the capitalist era—which he defined as a handful of great powers vying to divide and re-divide the world—was a product of monopoly capitalism, as opposed to the earlier stage of what he called ‘competitive’ or ‘free trade’ capitalism.

Thinking about the origins of imperialism as a phenomenon that spans many eras, Kenneth Waltz, a theorist of international relations, attributed imperialism, not to a particular mode of production (or stage), or to a particular form of political organization, but to what Marxist-Leninists call “uneven development” and what Waltz called “great power.” Owing to the uneven development of the world–as present in antiquity as it is today–some states are blessed with great power and others cursed with great weakness.

In his 1979 Theory of International Politics, Waltz wrote: “Weakness invites control; strength tempts one to exercise it, even if only for the ‘good’ of other people.” This he called “the imperialism of great power.” Whenever and wherever great power is found at one pole, weakness is found at the other. And whenever and wherever vast gulfs of power exist, so too does imperialism.

Where does great power come from? A “country that sustains an imperialist movement must produce … ‘surpluses’,” argued Waltz, by which he meant economic surpluses, “in the specific sense that the imperial country requires a margin of superiority over the people it controls.” The margin of superiority derives from the ability of a state to command, in excess of what other states can, the economic resources necessary to bribe, cajole, intimidate, and coerce other nations.

“[H]ow the ‘surplus’ is produced, and the nature of the state producing it, appear to be quite unimportant,” Waltz observed. “Republics (Athens and Rome), divine-right monarchies (Bourbon France and Meiji Japan), modern democracies (Britain and America) have all at times been imperialist. Similarly, economies of great variety—pastoral, feudal, mercantilist, capitalist, socialist—have sustained imperialist enterprises.”

Imperialism arises independently of the mode of production and the form of political organization, except insofar as the most advanced mode of production or a political arrangement compatible with it, allow a state to command a greater surplus than states around it can. “The economic organization that will cause imperialism (in the sense of enabling a country to pursue imperialist policies) is whatever economic form proves most effective at the given time and within the pertinent area.”  Hence, “the phrase that expresses the root cause that operates across differently organized economies is ‘the imperialism of great power.’” The handful of great powers that Lenin defined as imperialist were precisely those states that operated at the highest level of economic organization, i.e., monopoly capitalism. Waltz asked:

“Are the advanced countries ‘imperialist’ because they are capitalist or because they are advanced? The growth of industrial economies in the nineteenth century spawned a world-girdling imperialism. Was the hegemony of the few over the many produced by the contradictions of capitalism or by the unlocking of nature’s secrets, the transmuting of science into technology, and the organization of the powers of technology on a national scale? Is imperialism the highest stage of capitalism or are capitalism and imperialism the highest stage of industrialism?“

Great power also critically depends on population size. Luxembourg will never exercise great power, no matter how advanced its economy. But populous countries—the United States, China, Russia, India, Brazil, and a few others—have the potential to dominate and exploit smaller and weaker states, if they organize their economies to produce great surpluses. So far China appears to be the only country even remotely able to match the United States in surplus creation, but the gulf between the two remains enormous and shows no sign of narrowing. True, China is growing economically and militarily, but US GDP per capita—a critical component of state power—is growing faster in absolute terms, and the United States retains many power-relevant geopolitical advantages that China will never match. (See, for example, Michael Beckley’s analyses here and here.)

The imperialism of great power explains why the United States launched its aggression against a weak Venezuela. The vast US economic surplus—a product of the large US population and an advanced and efficient economy—has furnished Washington with what is far and away the world’s leading military. Washington uses its unparalleled military strength (plus its unmatched soft power) to impose its will on weak states. Venezuela, a country of insignificant power, greatly hobbled by years of US economic warfare, refused to develop the world’s largest reserves of oil in line with US elite economic interests. In a world of the imperialism of great power, it was—and has for some time been—the greatest power’s inevitable target.

Promoting Plutocracy: U.S.-Led Regime Change Operations and the Assault on Democracy

January 11, 2015

PROMOTING PLUTOCRACY
By Stephen Gowans

Chapter 1. What the West’s Position on Iran Reveals about its Foreign Policy
Chapter 2. Democracy
Chapter 3. Foreign Policy and Profits
Chapter 4. The State in Capitalist Society
Chapter 5. Concealing the Influence of the Corporate Elite on Foreign Policy
Chapter 6. Syria: Eradicating an Ideological Fixation on Socialism
Chapter 7. Ukraine: Improving the Investment Climate
Chapter 8. Kosovo: Privatizing the Economy
Chapter 9. Afghanistan: Investment Opportunities in Pipelines and Natural Resources
Chapter 10. The Military-Industrial Complex, Foreign Aid and Marionettes
Chapter 11. How Foreign Policy Hurts Workers
o Divide and Rule
o Socializing the Costs, Privatizing the Benefits
o The Assault on Substantive Democracy in Korea
o The Terrorism of the Weak
o Bulking Up the Police State
o Obviating the Terrorism of the Weak
Chapter 12. The West’s Foreign Policy Priorities

Richard Seymour: Hallucinating revolutions, pacifying resistance

While it may stir hopes that a popular rebellion is sweeping away oppression, the Syrian revolt, whatever its origins and proclamations, is hardly that. Its likely destination is a new US client regime in Damascus; its probable outcome the dismantling of what’s left of Syrian socialism, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. Would that it were all that romantic leftists fervently wish it to be, but a sober look at the rebellion, and recent history, strongly points in another direction.

Following blogger and author Richard Seymour, the views of many leftist who side with the rebels can be summarized as follows:

• All genuine popular liberation movements should be supported.
• The Syrian revolt is a genuine popular liberation movement.
• Western countries are intervening to tilt the balance in favour of an outcome they want.
• There is no sign they can achieve this.

Since few would disagree with the first point, we can move quickly to the second. Is the Syrian revolt “genuine” and is it “popular”?

If by genuine we mean the revolt is intended to advance popular interests, and that it doesn’t represent the pursuit of narrow interests under the guise of achieving popular goals, then the answer must surely be that the rebel movement’s genuineness depends on what section of it we’re talking about.

It’s clear that the aim of exiles in key leadership positions within the Syrian National Council is to turn Syria into a US client regime. The Muslim Brotherhood’s interests are undoubtedly sectarian, as are those of al Qaeda, a recent addition to the rebellion. Unless we pretend these groups are not part of the rebel movement, it cannot be said to be genuine in all its parts. To be sure, some parts of it are, but other parts—and very important ones—aren’t.

Is the rebel movement “popular”?

We don’t know exactly how much support the rebels have, or how much the government has. But we do know that each side appears to be able to count on the backing of significant parts of the Syrian population—the rebels on Sunnis (though less so the Sunni merchant class); the government on religious minorities. If the rebels represent a popular movement, then, inasmuch as the definition of “popular” depends on having the support of a significant part of the population, the forces arrayed against the rebellion are popular as well.

But should a rebel movement be supported simply because it’s popular? By definition, fascist regimes are based on mass support (without it, they’re merely authoritarian.) Most Democratic Party voters—as well as Republican Party ones—are part of the 99 percent. Both parties are popularly supported. Does that mean leftists ought to support them too? The Nazis too had a vaguely progressive section—that part on which the “socialist” in National Socialist German Workers’ Party turned. But its presence didn’t make the Nazis a popular movement for socialism or any less of a tool of capitalist-imperialist interests.

The counter argument here is that none of these popularly supported parties of the right are “genuinely” popular. (While popularly supported, they don’t advance popular goals.) But that gets us back to the question of whether the Syrian rebel movement is homogenous, united in aiming to oust the Assad government for a common purpose. Clearly, it is not.

On the other hand, we might say that the Syrian state isn’t popular, in the sense of its being said to represent narrow class interests, while the rebel movement seeks to overthrow those interests, and therefore is popular by definition. But there’s no evidence that any significant part of the Syrian rebellion is inspired by class interests, except perhaps key parts of the SNC, whose class interests align with those of the banks, corporations and wealthy investors who dominate the US state, media and economy. At best, parts of the rebel movement seek a liberal democracy, which would rapidly dismantle the remaining socialist elements of the Syrian economy. To be sure, Syria has never been socialist in the manner Trotsky’s followers favour—and a number of leftists on the side of the rebels, including Seymour, who Wikipedia notes is a member of the Socialist Workers Party— are devotees of the Russian revolutionary. But a liberal democracy would be even further from their ideal.

Seymour’s third point is that Western countries are intervening to tilt the balance in favour of an outcome they want. Since there’s no secret about this, we can move to point 4.

The fourth point is that there is no sign the West can hijack the rebel movement. There is an obvious objection to this: Were there a good chance Western governments couldn’t tip the outcome in their favour, they would be energetically opposing the rebellion, not ardently supporting it. Seymour’s point may be based, apart from wishful thinking, on the reality that there are large parts of the rebel movement that Washington does not trust, and therefore is reluctant to assist. The CIA’s role—at least that which is admitted to—has been to funnel Saudi- and Qatari-provided arms to the groups Washington wants to come out on top, and away from those it wants to keep from power. But therein lies the reason the United States will assuredly hijack the rebel movement. It will channel military, diplomatic, political, and ideological support to those parts of it that can be trusted to cater to US interests, and this overwhelming support will allow pro-imperialist elements, in time, to dominate the rebellion, if they don’t already. To think otherwise, is to ignore what happens time and again.

A brief example. In the summer of 1982 the Marxian economist Paul Sweezy hailed the rise of Poland’s Solidarity trade union movement as “heartening proof of the ability of the working class….to lead humanity into a socialist future.” [1] Maybe when you’ve lived on a starvation diet for years a discarded four-day old hamburger plucked from a McDonald’s dumpster starts to look like a steak dinner. Solidarity too was termed a genuine popular liberation movement, but it, like so many others so characterized, led, not forward, but backward. We know now that Solidarity’s high-profile supporters—The Wall Street Journal, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—had a better idea of what Solidarity was all about than Sweezy did—to say nothing of much of the anti-Communist left. Those who didn’t have their heads stuck in a utopian cloud saw clearly enough that Solidarity would not lead to “genuine” socialism, but to the breakdown of the Polish state, chaos in the Warsaw Pact, and a step along the road to rolling back Communism; which is what happened, and the decades since have been marked by the deepest reaction. Henry Kissinger recently concluded correctly that the Syrian rebellion “will have to be judged by its destination, not its origin; its outcome, not its proclamations.” Judging Solidarity by its destination and outcomes, we can hardly be optimistic about the Syrian rebellion, nor parts of the left grasping its probable destination.

The reply to this might be, “Well, at least we should support the genuinely popular elements of the rebel movement.” Seymour wants us to do this by seeing to it that arms flow freely to the rebels, as Gilbert Achcar (another follower of Trotsky’s thought), wanted to do with the Libyan rebels. This naively ignores who’s providing the arms, who they’re provided to, and what’s likely to be expected of the recipients in return. The main weapons suppliers, the Saudi and Qatari tyrannies—and who could ask for more convincing supporters of a genuine popular liberation movement?—are not channelling arms to genuine popular liberation groups. Instead, it seems very likely that military support is being heaped upon those sections of the rebellion that are amenable to a post-conflict working arrangement with US-allies Turkey, Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council and to settling in comfortably to a subordinate role to Washington. The idea behind arms flowing freely to “genuinely popular” liberation forces is that Washington backs leftists while the Saudi and Qatari tyrannies arm democrats. The naivety is breathtaking—on par with Sweezy’s embracing Solidarity as heartening proof of an imminent socialist future.

There’s more than a soupcon of absurdity in any discussion among Western leftists of “supporting” the Syrian rebels, since support amounts to nothing more than a rhetorical endorsement without any practical, real-word, consequences. It’s not as if an International Brigade is being assembled (backed by what? Saudi and Qatari money) that fervent anti-Assad leftists of the West can join to show real, meaningful support. Except weren’t the last International Brigades fighting against rebels? And come to think of it, aren’t the Saudis and Qataris backing an international volunteer brigade…of jihadis? If supporting Syria’s rebels meant anything at all, Western leftists would be making their way to Turkish border towns to offer their services to the Free Syrian Army, or the local CIA outfit attached to it. Perhaps a collection can be taken up to raise airfare for Seymour to travel to the nearest FSA recruiting center to put real meat behind his support for Syria’s “genuine popular liberation” movement.

Despite its surface appearance of empty clap-trap, Seymour’s position does have a practical, real-world aim—to neutralize opposition in the West to Western intervention on the side of the rebels by the people who are most likely to mount it—the Western left. Once you accept the argument that the rebels are a genuinely popular liberation movement and that massive outside intervention by imperialist powers won’t tilt the outcome of the rebellion in their favour, then all that’s left to do—as a way of showing solidarity with the rebels—is to raise not a single objection to their receiving aid from your own government. Which means that Seymour, who fancies himself a champion of popular causes against powerful conservative forces, may, on the contrary, be a pacifier of dissent against the most reactionary force around—US-led imperialism.

1. Paul M. Sweezy, “Response to The Line of March Symposium,” Line of March, #12, September/October 1982, 119-122.

Military Interventions: Progressive vs. Imperialist

By Stephen Gowans

Wars have almost always been highly devastating affairs, with dire consequences in ruined and destroyed lives, as well as in the destruction of economies, farms, factories, housing and public infrastructure. While it cannot be said that all people at all times have considered wars to be best avoided, it is safe to say that the humanitarian case against war is overwhelming.

This essay is concerned, not with war in general, but with military interventions. To be sure, military interventions are often inseparable from wars, since they are often the causes of them. But not always. Some occur in the context of wars that are already underway. And some happen without provoking major resistance.

Today, on the left—and even the right—there are many activists who are committed to an anti-war position, but who are more properly said to oppose military intervention. Opposition to war implies, not only opposition to one country initiating a war against another (aggression), but also to using military means to repel an attack (self-defence.) Yet it is highly unlikely that people who say they are against war mean that they are against self-defence. It is more likely that they mean that a military response to a conflict must only occur for valid reasons, and that self-defence is the only valid one.

However, those who have adopted an anti-war position often stress other reasons for opposing military interventions. These include the ideas that:

• Democracy is senior to other considerations and that people should be allowed to resolve internal conflicts free from the meddling of outside forces.
• Institutions and ideologies cannot be successfully imposed on other people and interventions that seek to do so (e.g., bring democracy to another country) are bound to fail.
• International law is a legitimate basis for determining the validity of military interventions and countries ought to abide by it.

In this essay, the arguments will be made that: none of these principles are grounds to oppose military intervention; one of them is empirically insupportable as an absolute statement; the idea that military force ought to be used only in self-defence is indefensible; and that had these principles been adopted as inviolable, a number of interventions that are now widely regarded as progressive and desirable would never have occurred. A case will be made, instead, that some military interventions are valid and that validity depends on whose interests the intervention serves and whether the long-run effects are progressive. By these criteria, NATO interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are not valid, while France’s intervention on the side of the United States in the American Revolution and the Union government’s intervention in the states of the Confederacy in the American Civil War were valid. Also valid were the interventions of the Comintern on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1938), the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) interventions in Korea (1950) and Tibet (1959), Cuba’s intervention in Angola (1975), and the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan (1979).

Full essay in PDF format: Military Interventions Progressive vs Imperialist