Category: War

Legal Illegal: The Question of Whether this War is Legal is the Wrong Question

2 March 2026

Stephen Gowans

Democrats are incensed that the US war on Iran is illegal. But how many US wars and other interventions, including sanctions, have been authorized by the Congress and blessed by the UN Security Council? Since 1945, the year the UN Charter came into force, most US wars and sanctions campaigns have either been undertaken without Congressional approval or have contravened international law or both. Criminal US wars and sanctions are not an anomaly; they’re the norm.

Reacting to the norm as if it’s an aberration is part of an ideological process of maintaining the legitimacy of the US state. The state’s lawless conduct is reliably characterized as a departure from the norm, rather than the norm. “This isn’t who we are. We uphold and live by international law. The current war is an exception.” No, it’s not. It’s precisely who you are.

Reacting to the norm as if it’s an aberration is a reflection of what the philosopher Charles Mills called ‘the epistemology of ignorance” – refusing to see what’s staring you in the face. For example, one can only believe that the United States is a beacon of liberty and paladin of democracy by refusing to see that:

  • the country carried out a genocide of the indigenous people and stole their land;
  • enslaved millions of Africans and exploited their labor;
  • didn’t give women the vote until 1920;
  • failed to provide blacks even formal civil liberties until 1965;
  • established formal colonies in Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, and informal colonies around the world;
  • practices democracy for the few billionaires and political impotence for the many;
  • defends and upholds the exploitation of wage and salary earners as a matter of law and high moral principle.

There has been a substantial increase in freedom and democracy since 1776, but that’s only because the people who were so long denied these advantages fought long and hard to win them. It would be more accurate to say that contained within the US nation has been a movement of the oppressed and exploited that has fought heroically against a contending movement of oppressors and exploiters. The two movements continue to define political struggle in the United States today, and around the world.

Democrats and liberals who oppose this war (mainly because it’s Trump’s war), also contribute to maintaining the fiction that the US state is legitimate by demonizing the war’s victims. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman began his blog today with a shockingly puerile assertion: “The Iranian regime is evil, and it would be a good thing if this war leads to its demise.” In other words, maybe the war is illegal, but the Iranian regime is heinous, so we can be assured that at the end of the day Washington’s intentions are good and everything will work out for the greater benefit of humanity. Apparently, childish analysis disqualifies no one from winning a Nobel Prize in economics. It may even be a prerequisite.

To return to the lawlessness of US wars. The trouble with dwelling on the illegality of US interventions, as if they could be expected to be otherwise given that they almost always are illegal, is that, not only does this buttress the notion that the conduct of the US state is, at its core, legitimate (when it clearly is not), but avoids asking the relevant question: Why is this intervention being undertaken?  For surely, if we’re troubled by the kinds of wars, both military and economic, that the United States and its pals wage against what are usually largely defenseless countries and peoples, we should want to know what causes them, so that we can know how to put an end to them.

Since February of 2022, the month Russia tried to conquer Ukraine, I’ve spent much of my time studying the origins of major wars. This has led me to the works of international relations (IR) scholars, including the neo-realists, the most visible of whom, these days, is John Mearsheimer. IR scholars can be commended, Mearsheimer included, for seeking the root causes of war, rather than indulging in pointless moral sermonizing. But they can’t be commended for their analyses.

Take Mearsheimer, for example. He began by articulating a model of major wars based on security competition within an anarchic inter-state system. States, he argued, try to maximize their military power in order to defend themselves against the possible aggressions of rival states. On this basis, he predicted that the United States would avoid major wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe in order to concentrate on containing China, its closest near-peer rival. When Washington embroiled itself in major wars in the Middle East, contrary to Mearsheimer’s theorizing, he declared the Middle East an anomaly, and attributed the failure of his theory to account for US conduct to an alleged hijacking of the US state by Israel and its lobbyists.

In fact, Mearsheimer’s argument that the Israel lobby runs US foreign policy, while allowing him to get out from under the failures of his “offensive realism” thinking, is part of the same ideological process of maintaining the legitimacy of the US state that is expressed in portrayals of illegal US warfare as a departure from the norm. Don’t blame the US state for its malignant wars on West Asia; at their core, the US policy- and decision-makers are decent and benign human beings who want to do the right thing. The trouble is that they have fallen under the sway of the Israeli Svengali.  The idea that Jews lurk in the shadows manipulating world events refuses to die.

I have leaned toward Lenin’s analysis of war, articulated in his voluminous writings from 1914-1918 on the first world war. The obvious limitation of Lenin’s thinking is that it is based on one war and the events leading up to it. He didn’t undertake an historical survey of wars, and obviously, could not take account of wars that have been fought since. Moreover, he used the term imperialism in a highly inconsistent way which has led to no end of confusion. All the same, I have found his thinking to offer a useful way to think about war waged by major powers.

Unfortunately, those who might be interested in Lenin, often read him second hand, rather than exploring what he said in his own words, free from the interpretations of others. Furthermore, on matters of war, they usually consult his pamphlet on Imperialism, which, in my view, is the least interesting and useful of his war-related work, though, sadly, the most frequently consulted.

Unlike IR realists, such as Mearsheimer, who are IR theorists because they want to advise the US foreign policy establishment on grand strategy, Lenin’s aim was to understand the origin of war in order to bring about a world whose realization would mean the end of war. In this respect, his concerns resonate best with those of anti-war activists, a compelling reason for turning to him rather than Mearsheimer and his IR colleagues, whose careers in academe tend to depend on how helpful their work is to a US foreign policy establishment whose aim is to exploit other countries and cement US domination over the rest of humanity.

Back to legality. Should it matter whether a war is legal? Who decides what is legal or illegal? It certainly hasn’t been people trying to free their country or class from exploitation. The United States and other large powers wrote international law and control the Security Council. If the Security Council says a war is legal, does that make it just?

I would argue, and so did Lenin, that a just war is one that brings us closer to a world free from the exploitation of one class by another and of one state by another. That is a just war, worth fighting, even if it is condemned by the US Congress and prohibited by international law and the Security Council.

Musical coda

What Might Lenin Have Thought About the US-Israeli War on Iran (and the War in Ukraine)?

Facit indignatio versum

(Indignation makes my verses) – Juvenal

1 March 2026

Stephen Gowans

In his analyses of the causes of the first world war, Lenin stressed the importance of understanding the policies the belligerent states pursued before the war. Borrowing from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the Bolshevik leader argued that war is politics by other (namely, violent) means. Clausewitz put it this way: “War is policy itself, which takes up the sword in place of the pen.” Lenin echoed Clausewitz: All “war is but a continuation by violent means of the politics which the belligerent states and their ruling classes had been conducting for many years, sometimes for decades, before the outbreak of war.”

So, what policies were the belligerents pursuing by the pen, before they took up the sword? The answer, in Lenin’s view, explained what caused the war. If “you have not studied the policies of [the] belligerent groups over a period of decades … then you don’t understand what this war is all about,” he wrote.

All the belligerents, argued Lenin, were pursuing the same policy: they were reaching across the world for opportunities to dominate its economic surpluses wherever they could be found.  They had been able to do this, for a time, without each greatly impeding the other. However, they had arrived at the point where this was no longer possible. The sum total of opportunities had been completely claimed, and acquiring new ones, could only mean encroaching upon the opportunities that other states, or more specifically, other ruling classes, claimed for their own. The cause of the war, then, was “the whole policy of the entire system of European states in their economic and political interrelations.” The war, said Lenin “steadily and inevitably grew out of this system.”

The word ‘system’ is important. Lenin saw powerful states as actors hopelessly entangled in a system of inter-state relations which pit one against the other for economic advantage. This was a system in which individual states, acting on behalf of, and as the instruments of, individual ruling classes, competed for opportunities to exploit labor and acquire raw materials in order to appropriate as much of the world’s economic surpluses as they possibly could. As a class, said Engels, the bourgeoisie has a common interest and this community of interest, which is directed against the proletariat inside the country, is directed against bourgeois of other nations outside the country. What do ruling classes do? Exploit the labor of subordinate classes. So, when the common interest of one ruling class is directed against the common interest of another, it is directed against encroaching on territory over which the other exploits labor.  The community of interest against the ruling classes of other states took both non-violent (by the pen) and violent (by the sword) forms. “These policies,” argued Lenin, “show … continuous economic rivalry between the world’s … greatest giants, capitalist economies.”  

In light of his analysis, Lenin believed that the question of which belligerent fired the first shot in the war—that is, which, in today’s terms, launched a war of aggression contra international law—was beside the point, for each was pursuing a policy that would inevitably lead to war.  As he put it: “This war is the continuation of a policy of … conquest, of capitalist robbery on the part of [the states] involved in the war. Obviously, the question of which [state] was the first to draw the knife is of small account to us.” Why? To reiterate: “Everybody was preparing for the war; the attack was made by the one who considered it most auspicious for himself at a given moment.” Another would have turned to the sword first, if, in the moment, violence was the means judged to be most suitable to the pursuit of policy.  For this reason, Lenin refused to blame Germany for starting the first world war, even though the Kaiser declared war on Russia and France and invaded Belgium.  “For decades,” explained Lenin, “three bandits (the bourgeoisie and governments of England, Russia, and France) armed themselves to despoil Germany. Is it surprising that the two bandits (Germany and Austria-Hungary) launched an attack before the three bandits succeeded in obtaining the new knives they had ordered?”

Much of the discourse on the current war in Ukraine is concerned with the question of which state started it. If we take Lenin’s view, the question is of no consequence, since the origin of the war lies not in Valdimir Putin’s decision to send Russian troops thundering across the border into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, or the decisions of US and NATO leaders to renege on their promises to assuage Russian security concerns by forbearing from NATO expansion into the former Russian sphere of influence. It lies instead in the rivalry between the Atlantic Alliance and Moscow for the economic interests of their respective ruling classes.

When I say the economic interests of the ruling classes I don’t mean specific deals, or pipeline routes, or mining concessions, although they may be involved. I mean, something broader: the ability of a ruling class to exploit opportunities for capital accumulation over as wide a territory as possible—which means at home, and if the state is strong enough, abroad. The existence of multiple ruling classes obviously complicates matters. Since there are multiple states, hence multiple ruling classes, there are multiple ongoing efforts to exploit the same economic spaces. This isn’t to say that security concerns aren’t relevant. The first job of a ruling class is to survive. Security concerns very likely played a part in Moscow’s decision to try to conquer Ukraine. But why do exploiting ruling classes want to survive? To exploit.

The Imperialism of Peace

Lenin’s analysis produces the interesting and important concept of the imperialism of peace. If war, in Lenin’s view is simply one means of pursuing a policy for economic space and opportunity, then soft-power, diplomacy, and other non-violent forms of inter-state intercourse, are but alternative methods of pursuing the same policy.  In the words of the German-Polish Marxist, and cofounder of the German Communist Party, the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, policy is pursued as either war or armed peace. Peace treaties may stay a violent hand for a time, but they do not eradicate the rivalry that gives rise to war. On this matter, Lenin and Luxemburg were ad idem with the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that a “treaty of peace makes an end to the war of the moment, but not to the conditions of war which at any time may afford a new pretext for opening hostilities” (emphasis added). This is a radical view. To end war, the conditions of war must be eradicated. Peace treaties simply paper over the problem and fail to address the root of war.

In the view of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Kant, inter-state rivalry is ubiquitous and interminable; competition among states is always present, even when violence is absent from their intercourse. If we define war as the effort of one ruling class to impose its will on another, then states are always at war, even if they are not using violence to get their way. Kant again: “A state of peace among men who live side by side is not the natural state, which is rather to be described as a state of war: that is to say, although there is not perhaps always actual open hostility, there is a constant threat that an outbreak may occur” and “the separate existence of a number of neighboring and independent states…is in itself already a state of war.”

Incessant struggle, even in times of formal peace, calls to mind the observations of numerous other thinkers. Lenin’s view was hardly novel.

Clinias of Crete, a character in Plato’s final dialogue, The Laws, contended that “Even what most men call peace is but a name. The reality is that every state, by a law of nature, is engaged at all times in an undeclared war against every other state.”

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan that: “In all times kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independence, and in ceaseless competition [for power], are in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns, upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbors; which is a position of war.”

British prime minister Pit the Elder in 1763 accurately predicted that the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years’ War, would be nothing but an armed truce.

French marshal Ferdinand Foch presciently characterized the Treaty of Versailles as “not a peace [but] an armistice for 20 years.”

While every state may be at war with its neighbors, some states are more able, as a matter of their great size and strength, to wage it. Washington is at war with every state (that is every other ruling class) that does not submit to US hegemony. Almost always the war is carried out as the imperialism of peace. For decades, Washington has waged war on Iran by mainly economic means, punctuated, every now and then, by violence, but violence has been the exception. The rule has been daily non-violent coercion extending over decades. The US war on Iran aims to contain and weaken the state so that it is incapable of extending its own domain to territory the US state currently dominates; to demonstrate to other states that what happens to countries that fail to toe the US line is that they will be menaced, throttled, and undermined by the United States, its proxies, or both; and to make Tehran more compliant with US demands favorable to US ruling class interests.    

Washington has long held Iran in a cruel economic vice that has immiserated Iranians. The predictable and intended outcome of this campaign has been civil unrest. The program has paid off handsomely for Washington, with the Iranian economy collapsing under the weight of US cruelty. Iranians took the street to demand their government provide relief from the pain, relief Tehran had not the power to provide. Even capitulating to US demands would not bring about the desired relief, since Washington refused to provide any immediate easing of its sanctions. On 20 January, The Wall Street Journal quoted US Treasury Scott Bessent: “U.S. financial pressure ‘has worked because in December, their economy collapsed. This is why the people took to the street. This is economic statecraft, no shots fired.’” To be clear, the reason why civil unrest erupted in Iran was because the United States brought it about, not by accident, not unintentionally, but by malice aforethought.

Bessent’s acknowledgement that the collapse of the Iranian economy is the product of US “economic statecraft”, which is to say the imperialism of peace, is virtually absent from the analyses of the quality, but all the same, Chauvinist and pro-imperialist, US media. No matter how sound their analyses might otherwise be, they cannot help but propagate the fiction that the collapse of economies undermined by US “economic statecraft” is due to the “economic mismanagement” of the targeted “regime.”  Thus, the victim is blamed for the miseries the US ruling class visits upon the victim’s citizens. This is true of the US imperialism of peace in Venezuela and Cuba as much as Iran.

As shocking and deplorable as the current US-Israeli attack on Iran is, is it any more shocking and deplorable than the decades-long dropping of economic atom bombs on the people of Iran by the US state and its bootlicking vassals, Canada, the UK, Germany, and so on? Indeed, it may turn out that US “economic statecraft” has created more misery in Iran than will be created by all the US and Israeli bombs that will be dropped and all the missiles that will be fired in the current campaign of violence. This isn’t to lessen the gravity of the violence unleashed on the Iranians, but to point out that a program of deliberately wrecking an economy and immiserating a people in order to expand the domain over which US and allied billionaires can dominate the world’s economic surpluses is equally deplorable and is as richly deserving of condemnation and opposition as the use of violence to achieve the same end.

Mendacity

As to the claim that Washington and its toadies are engaged in an operation to deter an Iranian threat, we can dispense with this piece of nonsense immediately. The notion that Iran is developing a nuclear arsenal and ICBMs to reach the United States is the kind of bald-faced, shameless, mendacity in which the US administration specializes. As the New York Times reported two days ago:

President Trump and his aides assert that Iran:

  • Has restarted its nuclear program;
  • Has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days; and
  • Is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States.

But:

  • There is no evidence that Iran has made active efforts to resume enriching uranium or trying to build a mechanism to detonate a bomb.
  • American intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States.

What’s more, US intelligence is of the view that Iran is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons.

Iran, a country dwarfed in population, GDP, and military assets by the United States alone, to say nothing of the United States and its allies, is no more of a threat to the United States than a Boy Scout troop armed with peashooters is a threat to a platoon of US Marines. All threats the chronically mendacious Washington cites are greatly inflated because Washington regards as a threat any state that 1) does not submit to US “leadership” and 2) has a means of self-defense. Iran will only be characterized as a non-threat when it has given up every means of defending itself. Indeed, US demands in its phony negotiations with Iran can be understood as an ultimatum to surrender all means of self-defense or face a withering attack.

Even if Iran had ICBMs and nuclear-warheads to place atop them it still wouldn’t be a threat to the physical safety of any person in the United States. North Korea is a nuclear-armed state with, what might very well be the ability to deliver warheads to the continental US by ICBMs, but it is hardly a threat. The reason why is that Pyongyang can’t survive a war with the United States, and therefore would never start one. The same would be true of a nuclear-armed Iran. What a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat to is Washington’s latitude to bully Tehran and impose its will on the state. That, in turn, is a threat to the US ruling class project of dominating as much of the world as possible. This, of course, is the aim of every exploiting ruling class, but few have the resources to pursue the goal. Most must be content with defending spheres of exploitation within their own territory, either by resisting the aggressions of larger states seeking to encroach on their own domestic sphere of exploitation, or coming to an arrangement that makes concessions to the larger state’s menacing demands. As for Iran, its failure to follow the path of North Korea is largely responsible for the peril in which it now finds itself. No country in Iran’s position that wishes to pursue an independent path free from the domination of the United States (or any other meddling great power) can afford to be without a nuclear deterrent.* Washington may sincerely believe Tehran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program and developing ICBMs because it makes sense for the Iranian state to do so in light of Washington’s own conduct.  It should be clear by this point that a view that is consistent with Lenin’s would deny that Washington will ever refrain from behaving in ways that encourage its victims to proliferate. The raison d’etre of the US ruling class is not to live in peace with other ruling classes, but to weaken them and turn them into vassals, and if that can’t be done, to crush them. Letting them be is not an option, any more than choosing not to try to score goals is an option for a hockey team.

International Law

Lenin’s view of war raises a question about whether international law has any practical significance. I would say that the answer is manifestly in the negative and I would hardly be alone in this view. Kant, for example, observed that “Codes [of international law] whether couched in philosophical or diplomatic terms, have not—nor can have—the slightest legal force, because states, as such, are under no common external authority.” Nothing has changed in two hundred years to contradict Kant’s thinking. Large powers and their proteges regularly violate international law without the slightest reservation and do so with impunity. They get away with it because there is no overarching, independent, authority equipped with the means to enforce compliance with international law. The strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must. Given this sad reality, it is “an illusion,” remarked the Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding, “to preach international law in a world … of capitalist struggle where [the] superiority of weapons is the final arbiter.”

I point this out because much discourse about war, apart from ignoring the imperialism of peace, attaches itself to outraged diatribes against the failure of various states (usually the United States and Israel, the accustomed miscreants) to abide by international law. Carrying on a discussion as if international law and the rules-based order have any significance as guardrails on the conduct of powerful states, focusses attention in the wrong place. The Tartuffe of international law, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, admitted in his vaunted World Economic Forum address what anyone not stultified by the propaganda of the United States and its international lickspittles already knew: That “the story of the international rules-based order was partially false; that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient; that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying vigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” If Venezuela, Iran, or Cuba were to violate international law, they would be held accountable and punished by the UN Security Council, largely a plaything and instrument of the United States.** When the United States and its proxies (Israel especially) violate international law, as they regularly do, nothing happens, except that a chorus of progressive voices bleats fecklessly about US and Israeli crimes, on the assumption presumably that ‘speaking truth to power’ will make the malefactors mend their ways. As the nineteenth-century French novelist Balzac is reputed to have observed: “Laws are spider webs through which big flies pass and little ones get caught.” Despite all the bleating, the big flies continue to pass through the spider webs with scarcely a concern.

To echo Hilferding, it is an illusion to preach international law in a world of struggle among states where the superiority of weapons is the final arbiter. As Lenin, and before him, Marx, argued, though not precisely in these words, inter-state war ends when inter-state rivalry ends. And inter-state rivalry ends, when states end. What should not be forgotten is that the long-range project of socialism is not only the end of class, which is to say the end of exploitation of one group by another, but, as a consequence of this, the end of states.  We say, declared Lenin in a lecture on war and revolution, our aim “is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.”

Notes

*On the other hand, nuclear weapons would not be a panacea for Iran. While they would very like dampen the war-lust of Washington and Tel Aviv for bombing Iran, they would do little to stop the US-led siege warfare that cripples the country and immiserates its people.

Moreover, Iran’s geopolitical situation is different from that of North Korea, and concluding that what is strategically sound for North Korea is also strategically sound for Iran, may be an error.

North Korea borders two significant powers, Russia and China. As states outside the US orbit, Russia and China are willing to trade with Pyongyang if it’s to their advantage. This makes the DPRK less vulnerable to US economic warfare than Iran, which is isolated geographically from China.

Additionally, Iran is located in, what is for Washington, a strategically important region. West Asia produces a substantial fraction of the world’s petroleum resources, which Washington aims to control in order to exercise leverage over China, Japan, and Europe, which depend on energy imports from the region. In order to control the region, Washington needs regional states to be submissive to US preferences. Inasmuch as Iran refuses to act as a US client, it has been the target of US conventional and economic warfare.

North Korea, in contrast, occupies territory that is less strategically significant for Washington, and therefore, Pyongyang can be more readily ignored. It matters little from the US coign of vantage that North Korea zealously asserts its independence. Doing so doesn’t affect US strategic interests. While it is true that China is considered the United States’ single most important strategic threat, and North Korea abuts China, Washington’s focus on the Indo-pacific region is mainly confined to maintaining control of the First Island Chain, the belt of islands running from Japan through Tawain to the Philippines and Malaysia.

An independent North Korea, then, is less of an impediment to US geopolitical ambitions than an independent Iran, and the United States is therefore less likely to be moved to attack it, nuclear arms or otherwise. It’s not clear that the same calculations apply to Iran. Why take a gamble on attacking North Korea, if the outcome might be a nuclear counter-strike? On the other hand, Washington might be prepared to gamble on attacking a nuclear-armed Iran, in light of Iran’s greater strategic importance.

** While the Security Council by no means invariably produces resolutions reflecting US preferences, on matters that do not abridge the interests of other permanent members, the council tends to go along with US wishes. Witness, for example, UNSC Resolution 2803 of 17 November 2025, which effectively ceded Donald Trump a personal autocracy over Gaza.  It is from this very same resolution that Trump’s Board of Peace was born.  There has been much talk about Trump using his Board, of which he is the chairman, as an alternative to the Security Council.  A case might be made that the Security Council is not the plaything and instrument of the United States, for if it is, why would Trump seek to establish the Board of Peace as a new Security Council? It’s true that a whole loaf is better than nine-tenths of one, but wanting a whole loaf doesn’t prove that you don’t already have nine-tenths of it. In any event, the Board of Peace is comprised, apart from its chairman, of leaders of states with insignificant power that have joined to curry favor with the US president. The Board’s power is in no way equal, much less greater, than that of the Security Council.  It may be able to compel its few members to go along with Trump’s whims, but the Security Council, in theory anyway, can compel the compliance of every UN member state.  

Venezuela and the Imperialism of Peace

5 January 2026

Stephen Gowans

A careful reading of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times offers the following account of what led up to the Trump administration’s decision to abduct Venezuelan president Nicolos Maduro. This account also brings to the fore the distinction between the imperialism of war and what Lenin called “the imperialism of peace.”

In 2007, Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, changed the terms under which US oil firms could operate in his country, home to the world’s largest reserves of oil.  ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips were presented with new contracts giving Caracas majority control over joint ventures. The US oil giants balked, and sued. The two companies were compensated, but believed they were not adequately indemnified. [1] Ultimately, this would lead to Washington imposing sanctions on Venezuela which blocked US investment in the South American country’s oil industry with one exception: Chevron was granted a special licence to continue to operate in Venezuela, with restrictions. [2]

US sanctions crippled Venezuela’s oil industry and devastated the country’s economy. Since 2013, the year Maduro became president, GDP has contracted by 80 percent—the largest economic collapse in modern history outside of war. Economic misery has driven eight million Venezuelans, about one-quarter of the population, from the country. [3]

With Venezuela’s economy in crisis, the Maduro government backtracked, opening the oil industry to private investment on attractive terms. [4] The re-opening was orchestrated by Delcy Rodriquez, who would become Maduro’s vice-president, and, with Maduro’s abduction, the country’s new leader.

The US oil majors began to pressure the Trump administration to lift the sanctions that kept them from taking advantage of Rodriguez’s reforms.  “They told Trump administration officials that … Caracas was so desperate that they would welcome U.S. firms with tantalizing terms not seen by the industry in decades—including no-bid contracts and little environmental or regulatory oversight.” Moreover, the US oil majors complained that Chinese and Russian firms were monopolizing the advantages the newly re-opened Venezuelan oil industry offered. [5]

The White House began to talk to Maduro about lifting US sanctions. [6] Trump told the Venezuelan leader that he wanted him “to push Chinese and Russian oil companies out of Venezuela and to open up a bigger role for American companies.” [7] Maduro agreed. In October, The New York Times reported that the Venezuelan president “offered Washington far-reaching concessions that would essentially eliminate the vestiges of resource nationalism at the core of Mr. Chávez’s movement.” In addition, he “also agreed to limit Venezuela’s economic ties with China, Russia and Iran and to stop selling oil to Cuba.” [8]

The two parties were keen to strike a deal because an agreement would be mutually rewarding. The US oil majors wanted the profit-making opportunities Venezuela could offer, and Maduro wanted out from under the crushing weight of US sanctions that had crippled his country’s economy.

But there was a problem. Trump’s top aides persuaded the president that Maduro couldn’t be trusted; that he would eventually renege on any deal the US struck with him. As a result, Maduro was told that a condition of the deal was his exit. If he refused to step down, the United States would use force to oust him. Maduro demurred, possibly believing that Trump was bluffing. [9] The Pentagon assembled an armada in the Caribbean to pressure the Venezuelan president to reconsider.

Meanwhile, Washington had to figure out who would take over from Maduro. The administration quickly settled on the country’s vice-president. She had “impressed Trump officials with her management of Venezuela’s crucial oil industry” and “intermediaries persuaded the administration that she would protect and champion future American energy investments in the country.” The White House believed they could work with her. [10] And why not? Both Washington and Caracas were keen on bringing US oil giants back to Venezuela and Rodriguez had taken the lead role in bringing about the oil sector renovations that had aroused the US energy companies’ interest. She could be counted on to do Washington’s bidding, because Washington’s bidding largely aligned with what she thought needed to be done. “She is essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said. “Very simple.” [11]

In the event US officials had misjudged Rodriguez’s tractability, they had a back-up plan. To ensure she played ball, she was warned that she would share Maduro’s fate if she stepped out of line. According to Trump, if Rodriguez “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”  Some sections of the US media complained that Rodriguez is a socialist who is railing against US encroachment on Venezuela’s sovereignty, and that Maria Corina Machado, the “conservative former member of the National Assembly from an affluent Venezuelan family [with] decades-long ties to Washington,” would have been a better choice. But Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security advisor, rejoined: “We’re going to make an assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly …  not what … they’ve done in the past.” [12] From Washington’s perspective, socialist or not, Rodriguez is clearly the better choice. She offers the reasonable prospect of producing what regime change would deliver—and within a framework of political stability. Installing Machado, in contrast, would mean incurring the enormous cost and uncertainties of waging a regime change war which, in the end, if it succeeded, would likely produce such great political instability that Venezuela would not be an attractive field for investment.

Imperialism can be defined simply as the process of one state imposing its will on another. The United States has clearly been trying to make Venezuela do what it wants, by using sanctions, and, of late, an oil blockade, to cripple the Venezuelan economy to force the country’s leadership to make changes to the terms under which it will allow US oil companies to operate. Washington has visited enough sanctions-generated devastation upon Venezuela to compel the government to change the rules governing its oil industry. These changes have aroused the interest of the US oil majors, but the energy companies are unable to take advantage of the new opportunities, unless the US sanctions that block them for operating in Venezuela are lifted. Accordingly, the industry has pressed the Trump administration to strike a deal with Caracas that would see US oil majors return to Venezuela.

The key to the imperialist process in Venezuela has been sanctions, not the armada the Trump administration has assembled in the Caribbean, and not the raid on the Venezuelan capital to abduct the president. Military measures have played a minor role compared to the role economic coercion has played; the imperialism of war has been less significant, in this case, than the imperialism of peace. It is true that military measures have been used to close the deal (to try to persuade Maduro to step down) but the deal was largely brought about by sanctions. Had it not been for Washington’s economic coercion, it is unlikely that Caracas would have changed the rules of investing in its oil industry.

I mention this because too little attention is paid to “the imperialism of peace”—what strong states do to impose their will on weak states without going to war. Lenin emphasized that strong states wage war against weak states as a continuation, by other means, of imperialist politics that are practiced during peacetime. Imperialism, in other words, is a broad category that includes war of aggression as only one mechanism of many for inducing another state to do one’s bidding. Imperialism doesn’t happen just in times of war; it is ongoing, even during peacetime.

The result of paying too little attention to the imperialism of peace is that voices aren’t raised in opposition to imperialist conduct unless it involves violence. People immediately took to the streets to protest Washington’s abduction of Maduro, but the abduction was small potatoes next to the enormous sanction-induced devastation Washington has wreaked on Venezuela. The sanctions have harmed and immiserated millions of Venezuelans; the abduction harmed less than 200. The sanctions have carried more weight in imposing the US will on Venezuela than has Maduro’s abduction; the ousted president had already agreed to the terms the US wishes to impose on Venezuela; the only condition he refused was his exit.

Economic coercion is sometimes referred to as “economic atom bombing” in an attempt to show that sanctions can be as destructive, if not more so, than the violence of war. John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote a famous article in Foreign Affairs, titled “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” showing that sanctions have killed more people than all the weapons of destruction ever used, including the atomic bombs used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [13]  A study published in The Lancet Global Health in July 2025, conducted by economists Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), estimated that every year US and EU sanctions are responsible for a half-million premature deaths worldwide. [14] In light of this, the necessity of building anti-imperialism movements that can take full account of the imperialism of peace should be examined. The danger of anti-war movements, from Lenin’s perspective, was that being so averse to war they would accept the imperialism of peace as a win, and therefore never overcome or even see the root cause of the wars of aggression they so loathed and feared.

Update

The Wall Street Journal has reported that a “classified U.S. intelligence assessment determined top members of Nicolás Maduro’s regime—including Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—would be best positioned to lead a temporary government in Caracas and maintain near-term stability.” (“CIA Concluded Regime Loyalists Were Best Placed to Lead Venezuela After Maduro,” Jan. 5, 2026)

“The report concluded that Edmundo González,” who ran against Maduro in the 2024 election, “and Machado would struggle to gain legitimacy as leaders while facing resistance from pro-regime security services and political opponents.”

The report also said that despite “initially striking a defiant tone,” Rodriguez has since “signaled her willingness to work with the U.S. and has spoken with Rubio.”

On January 6, The Wall Street Journal reported that Rodriguez “and Trump might be on the same page.” (“Venezuelan Regime’s New Strategy: Appease Trump to Survive”.) “Since becoming vice president in 2018, the 56-year-old has consolidated influence as Maduro’s top interlocutor with the private sector and trade partners. She has long advocated for American oil companies to pump crude in the country and says the only thing keeping them out are the economic sanctions leveled during Trump’s first term that bar companies from working in Venezuela’s energy sector.”

Here’s what Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez had to say about why the acting president is cooperating with the Trump administration (“Venezuela After Maduro: A Conversation With Francisco Rodríguez”, Foreign Affairs, Jan. 3, 2026) “If the Venezuelan government strikes a deal with the United States that lifts sanctions and where billions of dollars go into recovering the Venezuelan oil industry…Venezuela could see its GDP per capita in U.S. dollars triple in the next decade … [W]hatever government is in power could comfortably win free elections [with that record.]”

On why the White House rejected Machado, he observed: “Machado and her allies have advocated for imprisoning almost all of the Venezuelan military and political leadership. So I think if Trump were to simply install Machado, the risk would be ungovernability and chaos. It could also be a pathway to civil war, as ousted current military officers fight back against the government rather than risk going to prison.”

Finally, the Venezuelan economist confirmed that Maduro himself had “made an overture to Trump where he effectively said, ‘You can have whatever you want in terms of our oil industry’.” What is more, Rodriguez was seen as someone who “could deliver on that.”

On January 10, The New York Times offered more clues as to why the Trump administration has chosen Delcy Rodriguez as its key Venezuelan interlocuter (“How Venezuela’s New Leader Went From Revolutionary to Trump’s Orbit”).

  • “Maduro had already delegated practically all economic matters to Ms. Rodríguez, who simultaneously held the posts of vice president, minister of finance and minister of petroleum.”
  • “As foreign minister, she was part of the decision-making process seeking a reset of relations in 2017 with the United States at the start of the first Trump administration.”
  • Rodriguez’s record includes “a stealth privatization of natural resources” [my emphasis] which gave “foreign investors control over some coveted projects, such as oil fields, cement plants and iron ore mines.”

A January 14 New York Times report (U.S. Races to Sell Venezuelan Oil, Transforming Ties With Former Foe), explains why Rodriguez and the Venezuelan government are cooperating with the White House. The US blockade had “wiped out the bulk of the Venezuelan government’s revenues. Unable to sell its oil, the country’s limited oil storage facilities had filled to near capacity.” This meant two things:

1) “Venezuela’s state oil company was days away from shutting down the country’s main crude producing area, a move that would have caused some permanent damage to the oil fields.”

2) Caracas “estimated that the continuation of the blockade would set off a humanitarian crisis, by significantly reducing the government’s ability to import goods and maintain basic services.”

Unless something was done to keep the oil flowing, the country’s critical oil industry would incur long-lasting damage and Venezuelans would be plunged even further into an economic abys. Caracas faced two choices: Capitulate or starve. Rodriguez agreed to Washington’s selling about 50 million barrels of oil backed up in storage facilities. The oil has been sold and Caracas has received a share.

Washington has, for now, defeated Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. It has done so, hardly at all by the imperialism of war, and mainly by the imperialism of peace.

1. “Trump’s Claim That Venezuela ‘Stole’ U.S. Oil Fields Touches Nationalist Nerve,” New York Times, Dec. 17, 2025; “Trump Orders Blockade of Sanctioned Oil Tankers In and Out of Venezuela, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 16, 2025; “Trump Wants to Unlock Venezuela’s Oil Reserves. A Huge Challenge Awaits,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 3, 2026.

2. “Explainer: Why Chevron still operates in Venezuela despite US sanctions,” Euronews, December 29, 2025.

3. “Venezuela’s New Leader Is a Hardline Socialist Like Maduro,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2026; “Another U.S. Attempt to Topple Maduro Would Be a Disaster,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 7, 2025.

4. “Trump’s Tanker Crackdown Paralyzes Venezuelan Oil Exports,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2025; “Venezuela’s Capital Is Booming. Is This the End of the Revolution?” Feb. 1, 2020.

5. “Trump Was Skeptical of Ousting Maduro—Until He Wasn’t,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2026.

6. “Trump Says U.S. Is ‘In Charge’ of Venezuela, While Rubio Stresses Coercing It, New York Times, Jan. 4, 2026.

7. “Venezuela’s Oil Is a Focus of Trump’s Campaign Against Maduro,” New York Times, Dec. 16, 2025.

8. “Venezuela’s Maduro Offered the U.S. His Nation’s Riches to Avoid Conflict, New York Times, Oct. 10, 2025.

9. “Trump Was Skeptical of Ousting Maduro—Until He Wasn’t, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2026; “Venezuela’s Oil Is a Focus of Trump’s Campaign Against Maduro, New York Times, Dec. 16, 2025.

10. “How Trump Fixed On a Maduro Loyalist as Venezuela’s New Leader,” New York Times, Jan. 4, 2026.

11. “Venezuela’s New Leader Is a Hardline Socialist Like Maduro, “Wall Street Journal January 4, 2026.

12. “Trump Says U.S. Is ‘In Charge’ of Venezuela, While Rubio Stresses Coercing It,” New York Times, Jan. 4, 2026.  

13. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iraq/1999-05-01/sanctions-mass-destruction

14. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00189-5/fulltext

How Aid to Ukraine Harms Most Canadians (and Most Citizens of Other NATO States) and What to Do About It

4 December 2025

By Stephen Gowans

Canada has shelled out $22-billion of taxpayer money on assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country in February, 2022. [1] Might our money have been better spent on other matters?

For example, 20 percent of Canadian adults do not have a family doctor. [2] Could this money have been used to help provide Canadians with access to physicians and nurse practitioners?

“Affordable housing,” according to The Globe and Mail, “is out of reach everywhere in Canada.” [3] Could Ottawa’s generous aid to Ukraine have been spent instead on helping to solve Canada’s housing and rental crisis?

Ottawa plans to cut over 11 percent of the federal public service, a move which, on top of increasing the jobless rate—already near 7 percent—will likely mean longer wait times for unemployment benefits, passports, and government assistance programs. [4] Might future outlays slated for aid to Ukraine be better spent on maintaining public services for Canadians?

According to the government’s own statistics agency, “Over one in four Canadians live in a household experiencing financial difficulties.” [5] Could $22 billion have helped relieve these Canadians of their financial burdens?

Prime Minister Mark Carney says that “Canada will always stand in solidarity with Ukraine.” [6] In practice, helping Ukraine means doing less for Canadians. It means poorer public services, under-funded health care, less affordable housing, and more economic insecurity. Carney doesn’t say why Canadians must make sacrifices to stand with Ukraine, but knowing why is important if pressing domestic needs are to be ignored. Is the diversion of funds that could be used to meet Canadians’ needs justified?

To answer that question, we must first understand why Ottawa is backing Ukraine. The answer has a lot to do with Canada’s place in the informal US empire.

Canada is part of a US-led alliance that regards Russia as a “revisionist” power—that is, as a country which challenges the US-led world order—an order which naturally puts the United States at the top. The war in Ukraine is a contest between Washington, on one side, and Moscow, on the other. Russia is one of two states (along with China) powerful enough to challenge US ‘leadership’, or, to put it less euphemistically, US tyranny. While the word tyranny seems harsh, what else would one call a US-led global defined by Washington to, by its own admission, put US interests above all others? [7] Napoleon’s order in Europe was summed up by the watchword France avant tout, while Nazi Germany sought to create an order in Europe defined by the phrase Deutschland uber alles. Implicitly, Washington predicates its own global order on the idea of the United States above all others, or, America First.

Russia, Washington says, wants to revise the US-led world order. There’s no question that Moscow wants to do this. It has no intention of acquiescing to the will of Washington, and because it’s strong enough—unlike most other states—to challenge US primacy, it resists integration into the informal US empire. Russia prefers to carve out its own empire, where its own billionaires exercise influence and monopolize profit-making opportunities. The war is, thus, au fond, a contest over which country’s billionaires will get to exploit the profit-making opportunities Ukraine has to offer—the United States’ or Russia’s?

On a broader level, the war is being fought—with Ukraine as the tip of the US spear, or proxy—over the question of who will dominate parts of Eastern Europe that have historically fallen under Russian, or Soviet, domination. Will it be Russia or the United States? Ukraine, being the largest and most significant part of the contested territory, is the cockpit of the current struggle. The prize for the winner is lucrative investment opportunities and strategic territory, vital to the questions of a) whether the United States will continue to lead a world order as rex, and b) whether Russia will successfully resist US efforts to make it bow to US pre-eminence.

In disbursing $22 billion to the US side of the contest, instead of using the funds to improve the lives of Canadians at home, Ottawa is playing a vassal role to US investor and corporate interests and aiding, what in the end, is a project of furnishing US billionaires with investment opportunities at the expense of Russian magnates.

Defenders of Ottawa’s decision to aid Ukraine will point to a moral obligation on the part of Canadians to defend a victim of illegal aggression. To be sure, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is both a contravention of international law and an aggression.

However, Canada does not aid all, or even many, countries that fall prey to the aggression of imperialist marauders. If it did, it would soon fall out with its patron, the United States, the world’s imperialist marauder par excellence. If Ottawa genuinely stands with the victims of aggression as a matter of principle, it would have funneled military and other aid to Iran (only recently the target of a blatant and flagrantly unlawful US-Israeli aggression); to Syria, when Washington was bankrolling Al-Qaeda to bring down the Arab nationalist state (which it did do, successfully); to Cuba, the victim of a cruel six-decade-long campaign of US economic warfare aimed at ensuring that an alternative to the capitalist order will never thrive; to Venezuela today, the target of a US military pressure campaign whose object is to install a puppet regime in Caracas to better loot the country’s land, labor, and resources, especially its oil; and on and on, ad nauseum.  Need I mention Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Panama, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya?

Which brings us to the Palestinians. If the Canadian government was really motivated to defend the victims of expansionary rogue regimes that flagrantly violate international law, it would have provided aid to the Palestinian national liberation movement long ago. Palestinians are the principal victims of Israel, a notorious practitioner of rapine, aggression, territorial expansion, and contempt for the UN Charter. Instead, Canada has faithfully assisted the Zionist state to carry out what the United Nations, countless human rights organizations, and top genocide scholars, have called a genocide. Ottawa has sent arms to Israel; banned Canadians from sending aid to Palestinians standing up to the aggression and demonized Palestinian freedom fighters as terrorists; lavished diplomatic support on the Zionist state; and has refused to take meaningful action to pressure Tel Aviv to abide by the countless UN resolutions directing Israel to end its illegal occupations of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.   

So, no, Ottawa isn’t sending billions of dollars to Kyiv because it deplores aggression, champions international law, and feels morally bound to stand with the victims of Russian imperialism. To believe this is to close one’s eyes to Canada’s record as faithful backer of US and Israeli imperial aggressions. The reality is that Canada is furnishing Kyiv with generous aid because Ottawa’s standard operating procedure is to support—or at the very least, not get in the way of—the foreign policy preferences of its US master. If backing Washington and its proxies in West Asia (Israel) and Eastern Europe (Ukraine) means skimping on satisfying the needs of ordinary Canadians, then, from Ottawa’s perspective, so be it.

While this is bad enough, it’s about to get much worse.  Ottawa has committed, along with other NATO countries, to significantly increasing its military spending to five percent of GDP from a little over one percent today.  This is part of a Pentagon strategy to shift responsibility for confronting Russia from the United States to Washington’s NATO subalterns, so the US military can either turn its full attention to intimidating China [8], by one plan, favored by so-called prioritizers in the US state, or concentrate on shoring up US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, advocated by so-called restrainers [9].

The problem here is that there is no compelling rationale to increase military spending almost five-fold. The ostensible reason for the increase is to ‘deter’ Russia from further aggression in Europe. But no serious observer believes Russia is able to take on NATO, even at NATO’s allegedly paltry current levels of spending.  Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that “A senior NATO official said Russia doesn’t have the troop numbers or military capability to defeat the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe.” [10]

The idea that the United States carries the burden of defending Europe and that Europe could not defend itself without US assistance—and that therefore Washington’s NATO subalterns must significantly boost their military outlays—is false. In point of fact, the United States contributes much less to the defense of Europe than Europe does itself. Table 1 shows that the United States spends $50 billion annually on military operations in Europe, overshadowed by the $476 billion that Europe’s NATO members spend yearly. Whereas 100,000 US troops serve in Europe, the alliance’s European members contribute over 2 million infantry, air crew, and sailors to the continent’s defense.

Table 1. Russia vs. NATO in Europe
 Military spending ($B)Military personnel
Russia$1421,200,000
European NATO members$4762,041,300
US contribution to Europe$50100,000
European NATO members + US contribution$5262,141,300
(Europe + US contribution) / Russia3.71.8
Sources:
Russian military spending: Robyn Dixon, “Russian economy overheating, but still powering the war against Ukraine,” The Washington Post, October 27, 2024.
Russian military personnel: CIA World Factbook. NATO military expenditures and personnel: “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014–2024)” NATO. March 2024.
US military spending in Europe: Steven Erlanger, “NATO Wants a Cordial Summit, but Trump or Zelensky Could Disrupt It,” The New York Times, May 26, 2025.
US military personnel: Daniel Michaels, Nancy A. Youssef and Alexander Ward, “Trump’s Turn to Russia Spooks U.S. Allies Who Fear a Weakened NATO,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 20, 2025.

What’s more, together, NATO’s European members spend over three times as much on their militaries as Russia does on its armed forces, while the number of NATO personnel in Europe, excluding the US contribution, is almost double Russia’s (Table 2).  Were Europe’s NATO members to meet Trump’s five percent target, they would exceed Russia’s military spending by a factor of eight. To be sure, this would deter a Russian offensive in Europe, but it would be overkill. When the idea of the five percent target was first broached by the incoming Trump administration, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder dismissed it as “a made-up number with no basis in reality.” He said that “European NATO members now spend three times as much as Russia does on defense, and at five percent Europe would outspend Russia by $750 billion annually, spending roughly 10 times what Russia spends.” [11] Daalder’s numbers and those of Table 2, while differing slightly in some respects, point to the same conclusion: the five percent target is far too high.

Table 2. Russia vs. NATO (European members)
RussiaEuropean NATO membersEurope / Russia
Population143,800,000592,872,3864.1
GDP ($B)$2,021$23,02311.4
Military spending ($B)   
   At current levels$142$4763.4
   At 5% of GDP (NATO) $1,1518.1
Military personnel1,200,0002,041,3001.7
Sources:
NATO population: CIA World Factbook.
NATO GDP, military expenditures, and personnel: “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2014–2024)” NATO. March 2024.
Russian military spending: Robyn Dixon, “Russian economy overheating, but still powering the war against Ukraine,” The Washington Post, October 27, 2024.
Russian military personnel: CIA World Factbook.
Russian population and GDP:  World Bank.

Russia is militarily incapable of territorial expansion beyond Ukraine, and even in Ukraine—a country with only one-quarter of Russia’s population—its capabilities are severely tested.  Russia is no match for an alliance, whose European members alone, have four times its population and over 11 times its GDP. The idea that Russia has the capability to invade a NATO-alliance member is—to use a favorite phrase of US international relations specialist John Mearsheimer—“not a serious argument.”

Despite these realities, various NATO governments, Canada among them, are trying to foster the illusion that Russia threatens Europe. They are doing so in order to manufacture consent for a stepped-up level of military spending that is far in excess of what is necessary to defend the continent from a Russian invasion.  Not only is military spending at this level unnecessary, it will harm the interests of the vast majority of Europeans and Canadians. Higher defense spending will almost certainly mean cuts to public services. During a visit to Britain, the NATO secretary general warned British citizens that if they chose to funnel public-spending into maintaining the National Health Service and other public services, rather than meeting Trump’s arbitrary five percent target, they had “better learn to speak Russian.” [12] The message is clear: Important pubic services that benefit most of us, must be sacrificed in order to squander public funds on the military to meet a spurious threat. “Ramping up to 5 percent would necessitate politically painful trade-offs”, warns the New York Times. [13] Painful trade-offs mean painful for all but business owners and the wealthy. Within the current climate, the idea that higher military outlays will be underwritten by higher taxes on the rich and big business is unthinkable. Instead, the formula is: gull the public into believing a Russian offensive is imminent so they’ll accede to the gutting of public services.

Why would NATO countries commit to spending far more than necessary? There are three reasons that suggest themselves as hypotheses.

  1. The expenditures are intended for offense rather than defense. You don’t spend 8 to 10 times as much as your rival on weapons and troops to defend yourself. Doing so would be wasteful. But you do vastly outspend your rival if your intentions are intimidation and aggression, or your aim is to arms-race your opponent into bankruptcy and submission.
  2. Punishingly high military expenditures offer a pretext for NATO governments to ween people off public services. Public services are increasingly starved of adequate funding, often to fund tax cuts for the wealthy and increases in military expenditures. That governments routinely make these trade-offs show that they favor the wealthy, who rely little, if at all, on public services, but benefit from tax cuts. The wealthy also benefit from robust military spending, inasmuch as it provides investment opportunities in arms industries and underwrites hard-power which can be used to defend investments and trade routes and exact trade and investment concessions around the world.
  3.  Much of the increased spending will flow into the coffers of US weapons makers, to the greater profit of investors who have stakes in the arms industry, while improving the balance of US trade, a major Trump administration obsession. By diverting public funds from public services to US arms dealers, NATO’s non-US members are submitting to US economic coercion and arm-twisting in order to placate their master.

Given that the accelerated spending increases will almost certainly be financed by budget cuts to public services, Canadians will see their healthcare, education, and pensions suffer—even more than they already do—so US arms manufacturers can enjoy generous profits. Canadians, perhaps, should have expected no less for having recently elected as prime minister the former head of Brookfield, a leading global investment firm. But even if they hadn’t, Canada, like all other capitalist countries, is so thoroughly under the sway of the leading lights of the business community—as a result of the community’s lobbying and other direct efforts to influence the government and its policies, but also as a consequence of the power the community wields by virtue of its ownership and control of the economy—that it doesn’t matter who is prime minister. With or without Carney, the policy and direction of the government would be the same.  The only way it is going to change is if the power of private business to dominate government and public policy is ended by bringing private industry and private investment under democratic control.

NATO governments are presenting their citizens with a spuriously inflated threat as a pretext to significantly increase military expenditures.  We’re expected to believe that over 590 million Europeans are unable to defend themselves against 144 million Russians who, after almost four years, still can’t defeat 40 million Ukrainians. (Of course, a big reason they can’t defeat Ukraine is because they’re also fighting the United States and its NATO lackeys, Canada included, who furnish Ukraine with training, weapons, and intelligence.) We’re expected to believe that even though Europe’s NATO members spend three times as much on the military as Russia does, and have almost twice as many troops, that the alliance is vulnerable to a Russian invasion. These military spending increases—totally unnecessary for self-defense—will not come without a cost. Already, officials of various NATO governments have initiated a discourse on the necessity of making painful cuts to public services. The Russia threat is spurious—a stalking horse for advancing the sectoral interests of wealthy investors. If we allow this deception to stand and meekly submit to runaway militarism, all but the superrich—friends and class cohorts of the Trumps, the Carneys, the Merzs, the Macrons, and the Starmers—will pay a heavy price.

With one in five Canadians without a family doctor, one in four households in financial straits, 40,000 public servants on the chopping block, and the housing and rental markets in crisis, we are already paying a price. Unless we act now—by withdrawing from the war over Ukraine for billionaire profits, prioritizing the needs of Canadians, and bringing industry and investment decisions under democratic control—the price will grow larger still.

 1. Steven Chase, “Canada buying $200-million in weapons for Ukraine from U.S. stockpile,” The Globe and Mail, 3 December 2025.

2. Tia Pham and Tara Kiran, “More than 6.5 million adults in Canada lack access to primary care,” Healthy Debate, 14 March 2023.

3. Steven Globerman, Joel Emes, and Austin Thompson “Affordable housing is out of reach everywhere in Canada,” the Globe and Mail, 2 December, 2025.

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQHljrFMbfA&t=46s

5. Labour Force Survey, October 2025, Statistics Canada, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/251107/dq251107a-eng.htm

6. Bill Curry and Melissa Martin “Carney pledges support for Ukraine, unveils defence aid details at Independence Day visit,” The Globe and Mail August 24, 2025.

7. John McCain once wrote that “We are the chief architect and defender of an international order governed by rules derived from our political and economic values. We have grown vastly wealthier and more powerful under those rules.” John McCain, “John McCain: Why We Must Support Human Rights,” The New York Times, 8 May 2017.

8.  Michael R. Gordon and Lara Seligman, “Pentagon Official at Center of Weapons Pause on Ukraine Wants U.S. to Focus on China,” The Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2025.

9. Yaroslav Trofimov, “A Newly Confident China Is Jockeying for More Global Clout as Trump Pulls Back, The Wall Street Journal, 2 December 2025.

10. Matthew Luxmoore and Robbie Gramer, “Marathon Russia-U.S. Meeting Yields No Ukraine Peace Deal”, The Wall Street Journal, 2 December 2025.

11. Daniel Michaels, “Trump’s NATO Vision Spells Trouble for the Alliance,” The Wall Street Journal, 8 January 2025. 

12. Mark Landler, “NATO Chief Urges Members to Spend Far More on Military,” The New York Times, 9 June 2025. 

13. Landler.

Former Pentagon Chief Defends Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians by Citing the US Record of Slaughtering Innocent Civilians

By Stephen Gowans

May 9, 2024

The war of the enslaved against their enslavers [is] the only justifiable war in history. – Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

The journalist Max Blumental, who edits the GRAYZONE, posted a video of former US chairman of the joint chiefs Mark Milley cataloguing, in a maladroit effort to justify Israeli atrocities in Gaza, US campaigns in which civilians were slaughtered in numbers matching or exceeding the Israeli-engineered, US-arms-supplied, Washington-approved, genocide in Gaza.  

“Before we all get self-righteous about what Israel is doing,” intoned Milley, we should remember that “we slaughtered people in massive numbers, innocent people…men, women, and children.”

“War is a terrible thing,” he added.

Unlike Milley, I don’t condone the killing of innocent civilians, including those killed by Hamas.

But this invites the question: Which civilians are innocent and which are not? Anyone incapable of fighting—children, the aged, the ill—must be considered innocent. Civilians who take up arms and thus become combatants, are not innocent. In a war of oppressors against the oppressed, are civilians who knowingly participate in, benefit from, or approve of oppression, innocent? Is a settler innocent?

We might ask too about how the US and Israeli goals in war compare with those of the Palestinian resistance.

The US goal is to impose the will of the US economic elite on other people so that the global economic order remains tilted in favor of US investors, billionaires, and corporations. Today, the United States overtly prepares for a war of aggression against China, openly acknowledging the reason: Because the East Asian giant, by its size and rapid economic development, threatens to disrupt the US-at-the-top global economic order and topple the US corporate class from its commanding position at the apex.  

The Israeli goal is to impose the will of the self-appointed leaders of an ethno-religious group, Jews, on Arabs in the Levant.

The goal of the Palestinian resistance, by contrast, is to liberate Palestinians from the ethno-religious oppression of a racist Zionism that is backed by Washington and which uses Israel as its instrument to pursue US economic and strategic goals in West Asia and North Africa against the interests of the local populations.   

By his words, Milley implies that US and Israeli wars are just, and that the killing of civilians in these wars is therefore acceptable. By contrast, his words suggest that the armed action of the Palestinian resistance is unjust and that the killing of civilians in pursuit of liberation is therefore horrible, brutal, and vicious. Twelve hundred people killed in a Hamas attack is flagitious and intolerable in Milley’s view, but tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, slaughtered in a demented, openly genocidal Israeli campaign, is, in Milley’s view, just the regrettable reality of war.

Milley defends the consequences of US and Israeli aggressions by describing war as horrible, brutal, and vicious. In Milley’s words, US pilots don’t drop bombs and Israeli soldiers don’t fire US-supplied artillery shells; instead, civilians are slaughtered in sickening numbers by an impersonal thing called war. On the other hand, Israeli civilians are killed by a very personal thing called Hamas.

Milley’s tacit assertion that US and Israeli wars are just—wars which are, au fond, motivated by goals of exploitation and oppression—speaks volumes about what the Washington elite believes, as does the retired general’s implied condemnation of the war for liberation that lies at the center of the Palestinian resistance; a war of the enslaved against their enslavers.

In the world of the US ruling class, when Hamas does it, killing civilians is horrible, wicked, and intolerable, but when the US and Israel do it—producing civilian corpses in numbers vastly greater than any Hamas could ever come close to even remotely matching—it’s just the inevitable, yes, terrible, but all the same, excusable, consequence of war.

In the US view, then, killing many civilians in an unjust war is perfectly alright, even if horrible. On the other hand, killing comparatively few civilians in a just war is intolerable.

Given that Milley, not alone in the US-Israeli establishment, is willing to tolerate civilian deaths in massive numbers as, what he characterizes as, the regrettable but acceptable consequence of war, one can only conclude that what really bothers him and his fellow worshippers of Mars in the service of economic and ethno-religious elites, is not the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, but the reality that the enslaved Palestinians rose against their Israeli enslavers.  

From Lenin to Bourgeois Pacifism

August 15, 2023

Stephen Gowans

People’s Voice, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Canada, published an article on 2023 August 1 calling for “comprehensive nuclear disarmament” and Canada’s exit from all “aggressive, imperialist military alliances.”

As an explanation of how Canada, as a non-nuclear power, supports the nuclear weapons strategy of the United States, the article does a creditable job.

But it misses the point.

If our concern is to spare humanity the mass destruction of global war, it is not nuclear warfare alone that is the problem, but industrial-scale warfare of which nuclear warfare is only one possible part. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not, contrary to popular opinion, the greatest instances of mass destruction in history. That distinction belongs to the March 4-5, 1945 US firebombing of Tokyo.

“In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world.” In a campaign leading up to the atomic bombings, 66 “cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed.” According to historian Ward Wilson, “The destruction caused by conventional attacks was huge. Night after night, all summer long, cities would go up in smoke.”

The first to be attacked was Japan’s major city, Tokyo. On March 4 and March 5, wave after wave of US bombers dropped conventional incendiary bombs on the city, killing as many as 150,000 people. That incident, not Hiroshima, “remains the single most destructive attack on a city in the history of war.”

Three weeks earlier, US and British bombers had incinerated Dresden, the subject of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five. According to Yuki Tanaka, “During the 14-hour long raid, massive quantities of incendiaries burnt large areas of this city, that housed no military facility, and killed many civilians. The estimated victim toll varies between 70,000 and 135,000, the majority being women, children and old people.”

Estimated number of people killed

  • Firebombing of Tokyo, 70,000 to 150,000
  • Atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 90,000 to 146,000
  • Firebombing of Dresden, 70,000 to 135,000
  • Atomic bombing of Nagasaki, 60,000 to 80,000

Approximately 100 million people died in the industrial-scale warfare of the two world wars. Some 200,000 people, 0.2%, died from atomic bombing. Eliminating atomic bombs alone won’t eliminate the massive destructive power of conventional warfare. This is true, a fortiori, when we consider that developments in conventional armaments since WWII have increased the destructive power of these weapons by orders of magnitude. There are now conventional bombs that approach the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. It is not nuclear weapons that need to be eliminated, but war fought on an industrial scale.

What good would come of eliminating nuclear weapons, if 100 million people or more were killed in future wars with conventional weapons? The capability to lay waste to much of the world by conventional warfare is well within the means of humanity. Indeed, some analysts favor the spread of nuclear weapons precisely because they fear that without the weapons’ formidable deterrent power, humanity will be repeatedly led down the path of mass destruction by conventional means. In light of this, two questions need to be asked:

  • What are the causes of war?
  • What must be done to eliminate them?

The Second International, a multi-country organization of socialist and labor parties, had answers to these questions. The sum and substance of the organization’s diagnosis of the cause of war, and prescription for its elimination, was expressed in a series of resolutions on militarism and international conflict. One of these resolutions, prepared by August Bebel, with amendments by V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Julius Martov, is emblematic of the Second International’s thinking on the cause of war and its elimination.

Bebel et al. anticipated that large-scale wars in the modern era of capitalism would be wars among states driven by capitalist imperatives. Wars would break out as “the consequence of … competition in the world market.” Every state, the resolution noted, “is eager not only to preserve its markets but also to conquer new ones, principally by the subjugation of foreign nations and the confiscation of their lands.”

The Bolsheviks Nicolai Bukharin and Evgeni Preobrazhensky expressed this point this way in their ABC of Communism. Each “producer wants to entice away the others’ customers, to corner the market. This struggle assumes various forms: it begins with the competition between two factory owners; it ends in the world, wherein capitalist States wrestle with one another for the world market.”

The solution to capitalist-driven wars, in the view of these Marxists, was twofold. First, socialists would lead workers of all lands to join hands against war. Second, they would “employ all their forces to use the economic and political crisis created by the war in order to rouse the masses of the people and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”

Lenin insisted that it was not the business of socialists to help one set of states against another, but to use the struggle between them to overthrow them all. Unfortunately, the Second International, while paying lip service to this view before the war, quailed at the decisive moment. This galvanized Lenin to spearhead the creation of the Third International, from which the CPC emerged. The new international’s aim was to carry through the commitments the Second International accepted in words but renounced in deeds.

As the nominal successor to Lenin in Canada, it might be expected that the CPC’s orientation to questions of peace and war would bear the stamp of Lenin. Sadly, this isn’t the case. Indeed, in one statement on the war in Ukraine, the party dismissed the approach of Lenin as “not a completely accurate or particularly helpful assessment, especially at this critical moment.” It seems the party inspired by Lenin, has moved on from Lenin.

Had it not, it might have called on the working people of all lands, of North America, Europe, Russia, and Ukraine, to join hands, in connection with the war in Ukraine, to work for the war’s speedy termination. Instead, it campaigns against NATO alone, insisting dishonestly and unconvincingly that as a Canadian party it must deal only with Canada’s capitalist class. The mendacity of the party’s position is revealed in its zeal for demonstrating in front of the US embassy and US consulates. Evidently, the party regards US capitalists as much their own as Canada’s—but not the Russian or Chinese.

The truth of the matter is that the party’s rejection of the Leninist response to war, lies in its rejection of the Leninist understanding of the origin of war.  The party’s view is that the roots of the war in Ukraine lie, not in capitalist rivalry, but in a drive to war that is unique to the United States and its NATO allies.

In contradistinction to the CPC, Lenin argued that socialism “will remain faithful to itself only if it does not join one or the other imperialist bourgeoisie, if it says that ‘both are worst’, if it wishes the defeat of the imperialist bourgeoisie in every country.” In its conduct, and often in its words as well, the CPC refuses to say “both are worst” and wishes only for the defeat of the imperialist bourgeoisie of the US orbit.

Without the foundation of a Leninist analysis, it comes as no surprise, then, that the party is devoted to what Lenin denounced as bourgeois pacificism, the idea that disarmament treaties and leagues of nations can create a world of peace among cut-throat capitalist competitors.

In this vein, the party calls for Canada to sign and ratify a treaty that prohibits non-nuclear states from acquiring nuclear weapons and which additionally requires nuclear-armed states to phase out their nuclear arsenals, a treaty much like the existing Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Canada is already a member of the NPT. The NPT is proof that nuclear weapons treaties neither prevent proliferation, produce disarmament, or reduce the risk of major war. In fact, one can argue, along with Pyongyang, that North Korea’s exit from the NPT is the major reason why the United States has not undertaken an overt war against the DPRK.

Inasmuch as Ottawa does not develop, test, produce, stockpile, station, transfer, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons (since it has none to do any of these things with), Ottawa’s joining the treaty would be a matter of no significance. It would commit Ottawa to not doing what it already doesn’t do.

What’s more, Canada’s withdrawal from NATO would not be so consequential as to meaningfully reduce the risk of war.  Much as the CPC would like to think that Canada plays in the big leagues, its withdrawal from NATO would hardly be noticed. The war in Ukraine would continue unabated, as would the rivalry between the United States and Russia and the United States and China. As for the capitalist womb in which wars gestate, that too would be left intact. Canadians are as likely to be incinerated in a global war with their country outside NATO as inside it.

Lenin complained that advocacy of disarmament instils “in the workers the idea that the present bourgeois governments of the imperialist powers are not bound to each other by thousands of threads of finance capital and by scores or hundreds of corresponding secret treaties (i.e., predatory, plundering treaties, preparing the way for imperialist war).”

“It is sheer bourgeois deception to preach reforms,” wrote Lenin, “as a solution for problems for which history and the actual political situation demand revolutionary solutions.”

A cogent analysis, but then, the party, for whom Lenin’s thinking is no longer “a completely accurate or particularly helpful assessment, especially at this critical moment,” moved on from Lenin long ago. It basks these days in the warm embrace of bourgeois pacifism and proposals whose effect in saving the world from another global conflagration if implemented would be largely meaningless.

The Putin Club

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Speeches About A Nice Little Peace

By Stephen Gowans

February 16, 2023

The United States provoked Russia into a war by crossing Moscow’s redline when it encroached on Russia’s sphere of influence in Ukraine.

That’s the judgement of Graham E. Fuller, a former CIA operations officer and vice-chair of the US National Intelligence Council, now an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

“Washington denies the validity of any Russian ‘sphere of influence’ in Ukraine while the US itself still maintains its own strong sphere of influence throughout Latin America,” writes Fuller in a recent blog post. “And can you imagine a Chinese military base in Mexico to bolster Mexican sovereignty?”

Fuller’s analysis is sound. Powerful states preside over spheres of influence and don’t like other states encroaching on what they regard as their turf. Washington’s failure to respect Russia’s sphere of influence in Ukraine touched off a war.

But problems arise when Fuller’s “is” statements become others’ “ought” statements.

The fact that large powers have spheres of influence doesn’t mean that spheres of influence are acceptable. It’s not alright for Russia to dominate its periphery because the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere (and much more). On the contrary, it’s unacceptable for either country to maintain spheres of influence.

Others advance a related argument: The key to world peace is mutual respect among great powers for their respective informal empires. People who favor a multipolar world—one divided among a few large countries—are guided by this thinking.  But a world divided into multiple spheres of influence is the very essence of imperialism, at least as understood by J.A. Hobson, Rudolph Hilferding, Nicolai Bukharin, V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg—people who fought against the imperialism that preceded, and led to, World War I, and inspired the anti-imperialist movement that followed.  

To these thinkers, war was inevitable because the world was multipolar and the expansionary nature of capitalism meant that multiple powers would be forever jostling for profit-making opportunities in a world completely divided into spheres of influence. The competition would inevitably lead to war.

Unlike today’s self-styled anti-imperialists, the aforementioned thinkers tried to understand the roots of imperialism, in order to eradicate it. If the point of understanding the world is to change it, as Marx said, today’s ‘anti-imperialists’ seek to change the world without first understanding it.  

Revolutionary socialist thinkers believed that the solution to the problem of imperialism, and the wars that attend it, reposed not in peace programs, pacifism, and disarmament campaigns—dismissed contemptuously by Lenin as “simply running away from unpleasant reality, not fighting it.” Instead, it meant changing what made countries go to war.

The idea that great powers are capable of respecting other powers’ spheres of interest is naïve. Large states are under the sway of powerful capitalists, whose survival depends on their ability to access opportunities to exploit labor, land, markets, and natural resources in competition with capitalists represented by other states. Respecting other states’ spheres of influence means turning your back on profit-making opportunities. What capitalist state is going to do that if it has the power to challenge a rival?

Spheres of influence exist because capitalism—an expansionary system—inevitably breaches national borders. And just as much as capitalism compels great powers to breach their own borders to establish spheres of influence, so too does it drive them to breach their own spheres of influence to encroach upon those of rival powers.

One might as well ask rival corporations to respect the others’ market shares as exhort large powers to respect the others’ informal empires.

In the war in Ukraine, there are two questions critical to the origins of the conflict.

  • Will Ukraine be integrated into the Russian economy or the European economy? Russia’s war on Ukraine is intended to keep as much of Ukraine as possible in the Russian sphere and out of the European (and by extension, US) sphere.
  • Will Europe’s economic ties to Russia be weakened (especially in oil and gas) in order to more fully integrate a Europe that occasionally flirts with the idea of autonomy into the US economy? So far, the answer is yes.

Underlying both questions is a single, deeper, question. Whose investors, Russia’s or the United States’, will profit most from the opportunities Ukraine, and, more broadly, the continent as a whole, offer for capital accumulation? In the capitalist struggle for profits, which countries’ investors will come out ahead?

Against this backdrop, Lenin’s contempt for the pious expressions of benevolence that form the stock in trade of what he called “the propaganda of peace” becomes understandable. Against the profits of the few, the voices of the many for peace count for nothing in the halls of power. Roger Waters’ plea to the UN Security Council for peace, sponsored by Russia, fosters the illusion that the world can be changed by “speaking truth to power.” But as Noam Chomsky once remarked, power already knows the truth. Moreover, “power” doesn’t care what you, or I, or Rogers Waters think.

Waters has taken the side of Russia, which is why the Russian embassy to the UN asked him to address the council. The musician has come to his position on the grounds that (1) Biden is a bigger gangster than Putin and (2) the United States provoked Russia. Both of these statements are true, but neither justify Russia’s aggression, neither provide tenable grounds to side with Russia, and siding with Russia isn’t going to deliver the world from the horrors of war.

Waters is like a person who deplores the violence of boxing, and, after attending a boxing match, blames the ensuing violence on the boxer who threw the first punch. The musician remains to be instructed in the reality that boxing is a violent sport, and that if you want to end the violence of boxing, you have to end boxing, not plead with the boxers to be nicer fellows.

Committed to the idea that capitalism makes war inevitable in a world parceled out among great powers into spheres of influence, Lenin argued that the key to ending war, lay, not in siding with the weaker power (the lesser gangster in Waters’ terms), but in replacing the capitalism that entangles states in a rivalry for economic advantage—that is, in striking at the root of the problem. Radical, from Latin radix, radic- ‘root’, aptly describes Lenin’s approach. Sadly, radicalism has few apostles nowadays.

Were Lenin here today to witness Waters’ Russian-sponsored plea for peace to the UN Security Council, he might summon words little different from those he uttered in 1916. “The German, the English, and the Russian governments only stand to gain from speeches in the socialist camp about a nice little peace, because …  they instil belief in the possibility of such a peace under the present governments.”

Peace, Lenin said on another occasion, “must be sought for and fought for, not in … a reactionary utopia of a non-imperialist capitalism, not in a league of equal nations under capitalism,” both of which he saw as illusions, but in a radical solution to the problem.

The horrors of war will not be eliminated by speeches about a nice little peace, nor by raging against one war machine and not another, and nor by failing to recognize that the war machine is capitalism (and not only the US expression of it.)

Neither will war and all its terrors be ended by practice untethered from a coherent theory of war.

There Are No Lesser Evils in Imperialism

December 19, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

According The New York Times, the US arms industry is profiting handsomely from the war in Ukraine.

  • The Pentagon has awarded at least $6 billion to arms companies to resupply weapons sent to Ukraine.
  • Raytheon has secured $2 billion in contracts to expand or replenish weapons used to help Ukraine.
  • Lockheed has secured nearly $1 billion to refill stockpiles being used in Ukraine.
  • The share prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have jumped more than 35% this year.
  • US arms sales to foreign militaries—many of which have boosted military spending in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine—total $81 billion this year.

In response I tweeted the following.

Had Moscow not pulled the trigger on war in Ukraine, the conditions would never have been set for Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to swim in a sea of new orders.

This elicited the following reply: “The bigger thanks goes to all the people who have blocked or refused to negotiate to end this war. Like the state department, Biden etc.”

Why would we expect the people who desired the war, viz., “the state department, Biden etc.”, to have the slightest inclination to want the war to end, when its clients—the US arms industry, the US oil and gas industry, and US industry generally—profit handsomely from it? Expecting Washington to negotiate the end of the war is tantamount to expecting wolves to become vegetarians—especially when the wolves have discovered a toothsome feast.

Did I mention that with Europe looking for a new energy supplier, after Washington pressed the EU to wean itself off Russian energy in the wake of the Kremlin’s assault on Ukraine, that the United States has become the world’s leading exporter of liquid natural gas? It is also the planet’s top petroleum producer.

At the same time, we wouldn’t expect Russia, the party that instigated the war and has failed to achieve its war aims, to have much desire to bring its assault to an end. It too is a wolf, with a hunger for sheep, so far unsated.

The notion that either the Russian wolf or a lupine Washington have, at this point, strong motivations to end their hunt for Ukrainian sheep is Quixotic.

The additional notion that the Fata Morgana of “the antiwar movement” can pressure “the state department, Biden etc.” or Moscow to negotiate an end to the war is equally illusory.

In the West, there exists a farrago of Washington-haters who call themselves antiwar but are merely anti-US. They flatter themselves that they are the nucleus of an antiwar movement. If capitalist imperialism is one of the greatest causes of human misery, they don’t know it. The critical problem, in their minds, is the people who run US foreign policy. If only the right people were elected, or the current set of leaders were pressured by popular opinion to conduct the country’s foreign policy differently, all would be well.

Almost to a person, this group of activists argued vehemently before the war, and with unbridled certitude, that Moscow would never invade Ukraine. In their astigmatic and decidedly un-Marxist Weltanschauung, military aggression, like imperialism, is a US monopoly. Russia would never, therefore, behave in so scurvy a (US) manner. To US warnings that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, they thundered scornfully, “US propaganda!” Despite Putin providing them with ample reason to revise their view of Moscow’s nature and capabilities, and notwithstanding the egg that still drips from their faces, they cling tenaciously to the now discredited theory that Putin’s Russia is not imperialist. They have discovered a multitude of reasons why it was obvious from 2014 that an invasion was not only predictable but desirable…and un-imperialist, of course. But if before the war they denounced the claim that Russia was capable of launching a war of aggression on its neighbor as a slander against Moscow, viz., that Moscow would never carry out so heinous an act (after all, wasn’t Moscow a member of the now forgotten Friends of the UN Charter?), how is that they have so quickly come to regard what they once saw as heinous as justifiable and even desirable?

If states were free to act just as they pleased, Russia could end the war now by reversing the act that instigated it. But true to their inability to see beyond Washington to rivalry among states as an immanent characteristic of the capitalist world economy, and one with a high probability of ending in war, the Friends of Neo-Imperial Russia demand Biden negotiate an end to the war, not that Russia do the same, and not that Putin withdraw his forces from Ukraine. They believe implicitly that the Kremlin is champing at the bit to negotiate a peace, out of a strong devotion to international harmony, and all that prevents the flower of peace from blooming is Washington’s intransigence. What they fail to mention is that the peace Putin aspires to is a peace in which Russia is allowed to digest those parts of Ukraine it has already gobbled up. In other words, it wants to achieve at least some of its war aims, and then to be left in peace to enjoy them. It is a commonplace that all belligerents want peace. What’s rarely acknowledged is that they want peace on their own terms. Peace preferably; war if necessary.

An antiwar movement, if one existed in either the West or Russia, would seek to end the war in order to lift the burden it has imposed on ordinary people. People everywhere, in Russia as much as Europe and North America, struggle to make ends meet as the war sends energy, food, and housing costs soaring.

Instead, Westerners who say they are against the war, but are really against the US part in it, seek fecklessly to mobilize energy for an antiwar movement based on the following arguments:

  • Putin’s cause is just.
  • The war escalates the risk of a nuclear exchange.
  • A world where Russia and China, and not just the United States, can throw around their weight, is desirable.

The trouble is that the power of any of these arguments to arouse opposition to the war is approximately zero, which is why there is no antiwar movement.

First, it is difficult enough to justify a war of aggression with good arguments. But the arguments for war offered by Moscow have been so risible that no one, except Russian chauvinists and a few mental defectives in the West, have taken them seriously. If we accept the argument that Russia has been provoked by escalating NATO military threats and that Moscow’s efforts to project influence into Ukraine through diplomatic means were rebuffed by Washington and NATO, there remain two objections: (1) Being provoked is not a legitimate reason for war; and (2) imperialist goals achieved through diplomatic means are still imperialist goals; they are no more acceptable for being achieved through soft power than hard.

Second, the threat of nuclear annihilation is a constant. People have learned to live with it. It will not move them to action and the intensity and scope of this war has not been great enough to meaningfully escalate the risk of a nuclear exchange.

Third, you can put lipstick on the idea of Russia and China having as much clout as the United States by calling three-power imperialism “multipolarity”, but the idea remains a pig no matter how much lipstick the sow is forced to wear. Anyone who thinks it’s possible to mobilize large numbers of people under the banner “we need three strong imperialist powers instead of one”, is detached from reality.

But what if people were mobilized for reasons that resonate with their suffering to oppose the war in numbers large enough to pressure governments to act? Would the movement not also be large enough to bring about a social revolution to overcome the very roots of the problem, namely, capitalist-driven competition for markets, raw materials, investment opportunities and strategic territory? In other words, wouldn’t a movement large enough and powerful enough to end a symptom of the disease also not be large enough and powerful enough to end the disease itself? Should the goal be to end this particular war, or to significantly reduce the probability of war by overthrowing the conditions that conduce to it?

Finally, is there much point in calling for an antiwar movement here, and not one there? The war affects all working people, Russians as much, indeed more than North Americans and (Ukrainians excepted) Europeans. An antiwar movement ought to unite, across international lines, all people affected deleteriously by it against the class that wills it and the system of capital accumulation that demands it. It must be international, not confined to one side.

People who call for Washington to negotiate an end to the war, but not Russia to reverse the act that instigated it; who argue that the ultimate responsibility for the war lies with US foreign policy and not the global capitalist economy (like saying flu is caused by a sore throat); whose reasons for opposing the war having nothing to do with the effect it has on ordinary people, and only on the effect it has on the imperialist aspirations of Moscow; and who call, not for a union of antiwar voices across international lines, but an antiwar parochialism confined to the West, are arguing for the side of the Russian ruling class against that of the United States.

Marxism, socialism, the workers’ movement, are not movements against US foreign policy alone, but against the capitalist class, no matter what its postal address. These movements are also for something: Not the rise of two great capitalist powers, Russia and China, against a third, the United States, but for socialism and workers of the world uniting. They are for an end to the division of humanity into classes and nations, and not, as the bogus antiwar activists would have it, the persistence of class and the rise of great nation states.

A Brief Critique of Anti-War Activism

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