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	$142	1,200,000
European NATO members	$476	2,041,300
US contribution to Europe	$50	100,000
European NATO members + US contribution	$526	2,141,300
(Europe + US contribution) / Russia	3.7	1.8
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)
	Russia	European NATO members	Europe / Russia
Population	143,800,000	592,872,386	4.1
GDP ($B)	$2,021	$23,023	11.4
Military spending ($B)
At current levels	$142	$476	3.4
At 5% of GDP (NATO)		$1,151	8.1
Military personnel	1,200,000	2,041,300	1.7
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.

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.
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.
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.

Ret. Gen. Mark Milley says the US has committed so many war crimes over the years, it has no right to criticize Israel's devastation of Gaza

Palantir CEO Alex Karp chimes in: "The peace activists are actually the war activists, and we're the peace activists."

Karp says of Gaza… pic.twitter.com/Ktc5H4uYJi
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 8, 2024

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.

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.

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon say ‘Thank-You Mr. Putin!’

Raytheon has secured $2B in contracts to expand or replenish weapons used to help Ukraine.

Lockheed has secured nearly $1B to refill stockpiles being used in Ukraine.https://t.co/0qavd8Rygb
— Stephen Gowans (@GowansStephen) December 18, 2022

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

Would a Plan for a Just Peace in Ukraine Make Any Difference?

December 5, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

Would a peace plan for Ukraine that addresses each parties’ ostensible concerns about security and ethnic rights create a lasting peace?

In my view, it would not.

The parties’ substantive concerns are economic. Concerns about security and ethnic rights, while real, conceal more profound issues.

A plan that addresses the surface concerns but not the substantive ones is bound to fail.

What might the contours of a peace plan for Ukraine look like?

Russia withdraws from all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.
Ukraine
- Pledges neutrality, foreswearing membership in any military bloc.
- Agrees to an irrevocable long-term lease of Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol.
- Guarantees languages rights for Russophones and declares Ukraine to be a country for all its citizens, not a national Ukrainian state, and not one in which ethnic Ukrainians have superior rights. Instead, all citizens are guaranteed equal rights regardless of their language, religion, or ethnicity.

This proposal meets Russia’s stated concerns about security and the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine. At the same time, it restores all Ukraine’s territory.

But the plan fails to address key areas of tension.

First, it says nothing about whether the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, built to circumvent Ukraine as a transitway for Russian natural gas, will be re-engaged to fulfill their originally intended role. If so, Ukraine will be denied a major source of revenue in transit fees. After the United States, Ukraine had been the major opponent of the pipelines. Kyiv would be expected to oppose any move to open the pipelines. So too would Washington.

It is unlikely that Moscow would agree to a plan that doesn’t see Russia’s return to Europe as a hydrocarbons vendor. Washington, conversely, is likely to oppose Russia’s re-engagement with Europe as an energy provider, considering that Europe’s renunciation of Russian gas has provided Washington with a much-needed market for US LNG. The United States is now the world’s top LNG exporter.

Second, the plan fails to address perhaps the key issue underlying tensions since 2014: Whether Ukraine’s economy will be oriented toward the West or Russia.

Bearing an antipathy to Russia, a country they see as an historical oppressor, nationalist ethnic Ukrainians have pressured Kiev to orient their country toward the West, not only militarily, but economically. In contrast, Russophone Ukrainians have inclined more strongly to economic integration with Russia. For these reasons, Washington and Brussels have supported nationalist ethnic Ukrainians, and Moscow has backed Russophone Ukrainians. Both ethnic groups are used as tools by their superpower patrons to advance great power goals in Ukraine.

Thus, the cultural struggle between ethnic Ukrainians and Russophone Ukrainians is not only a struggle over nationalism and linguistic rights, but also a struggle over economics, with both the West and Russia intervening in Ukraine’s affairs for self-serving economic ends. A plan that addresses the surface linguistic and cultural concerns, but fails to tackle the key issue of Ukraine’s integration into one or the other economic bloc, will not produce a durable peace.

Cut-throat competition for markets, raw materials, pipeline routes, investment opportunities, and strategic territory is an enduring feature of capitalism. It is unlikely that a workable plan for peace can be found in a world in which capitalist competition is a constant.

To sum up, a peace plan that addresses the ostensible reasons for war will make little difference. Ostensible reasons mask deeper motives—motives whose taproot is capitalist competition.

To end the fighting, one of two things must happen:

Russia, the United States, the European Union, and Ukraine pledge not to conduct themselves as capitalist powers. This isn’t going to happen.
The competition for Ukraine weakens one or both of the sides until one or both decides the potential gains are outweighed by the costs.

That’s how competitions end. In the victory of one side, in both sides simultaneously withdrawing, or in the mutual ruin of both. They don’t end in a just peace.

Is the Communist Split on the War in Ukraine an Echo of An Earlier Division?

December 2, 2022

By Stephen Gowans

Eliseos Vagenas, a member of the central committee of the Greek Communist party (KKE), has written an interesting article in the party’s newspaper, Rizospastis, refuting the claim that the Russian invasion of Ukraine fostered a split in the international communist movement (ICM). Vagenas contends that the split existed well before the Russian invasion.

One can also argue that the split recapitulates a division within the Second International circa 1914—one which led to the creation of the Third International and the Communist parties to which the current ICM is its nominal heir.

According to the Greek communist, the ICM has been split for some time on a least six questions, summarized below. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the parties moved to support or oppose Moscow, based on their pre-existing orientations, defined by either approach 1 or approach 2.

Two questions are critical to the positions the various ICM parties have taken on the war in Ukraine:

What does imperialism mean?
Is peace achievable in a capitalist world?

Communist parties that have either leaned toward outright support of Russia or greater condemnation of the United States and NATO, tend to view imperialism in a manner that departs significantly from the classical Marxist view and have developed an understanding of how to end war that revises Marx and borrows from liberalism. These parties see imperialism as the aggressive foreign policy of one capitalist state, the United States (and its satellites), and regard Russia as a victim of US imperialism. For them, the term ‘US imperialism’ is redundant, because imperialism is a monopoly of the United States.

What’s more, these parties tend to equate imperialism with war, and reject the notion that it has other dimensions, including peaceful capitalist competition, diplomacy, and even international security architectures. (Ask the North Koreans whether the UN Security Council is an expression of imperialism.) For these parties, imperialism is US war-making and little else.

In contrast, parties that view the war in Ukraine as an inter-imperialist conflict adopt the classical Marxist view of imperialism. For them, imperialism is a system of cut-throat competition among states in which each state is compelled to expand the territory over which it has influence and control in order to guarantee its access to markets, raw materials, investment opportunities and strategic territory and thereby to ensure its self-preservation and that of the capital accumulating enterprises it represents. The competition is expressed in multiple ways, including war, but not limited to it. It may be, and has more often than not been, expressed in trade and investment agreements. (See, for example, Robinson’s and Gallagher’s The Imperialism of Free Trade.)

Kenneth Waltz’s review of the split in the socialist movement precipitated by WWI, which he presents in his classic Man, The State, and War, calls to mind the current split in the ICM as identified by Vagenas.

Parties which support Russia in its war on Ukraine tend to embrace, as Waltz describes them, “the techniques of the bourgeois peace movement—arbitration, disarmament, open diplomacy” as well as the belief that popular opinion “can exert enough pressure upon national governments to ensure peace.” This, Waltz argues, is a revision of Marx’s view, which “points to capitalism as the devil.” The “socialism that would replace capitalism was for Marx the end of capitalism and the end of states,” and it was the end of states, for Marx, that meant the end of war. An anti-war movement founded on the notion that popular pressure and international security architectures can ensure peace, is a tradition that Waltz identifies as originating in the Second International as a revision of Marx. It is also a tradition that Waltz pointedly notes failed to keep the peace in 1914.

Waltz elaborates. Members of the Second International “were united in that they agreed that war is bad, yet they differed on how socialists were to behave in a war situation. … Jean Jaures and Keir Hardie eloquently urged a positive program of immediate application. Socialists, they said, can force capitalist states to live at peace.” As history shows, they couldn’t. Indeed, most socialists facilitated the war by supporting one of the belligerents.

In contrast, some “French and most German socialists argued that capitalist states are by their very nature wedded to the war system; the hope for the peace of the world is then to work for their early demise.” It is not, to bring the argument up to date, to support the weaker capitalist states in order to balance the strongest in a multipolar system. Indeed, this view is anti-Marxist in the extreme. For Marx, war ends when states end, not when weaker states balance the strongest and the world becomes multipolar.

The precursors of the Third International, Communists avant la lettre, argued that wars “are part and parcel of the nature of capitalism; they will cease only when the capitalist system declines, or when the sacrifices in men and money have become so great as a result of the increased magnitude of armaments that the people will rise in revolt against them and sweep capitalism out of existence.”

This resonates with the view of Vagenas, advocating for approach 2 as presented in the table above: The “capitalist world cannot be ‘democratized’.” It “cannot escape from wars no matter how many ‘poles’ it has.” War can only be escaped through “the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, for the new, socialist society.”

Approach 1, then, evokes the Second International, while approach 2 appears to be consistent with the positions of the Third International.

On the basis of the foregoing, it would seem fitting to label approach 1 as “Liberal Bourgeois,” consistent with its tolerance of Communist participation in capitalist governments and broad progressive movements for capitalism’s reform; its penchant for a stepwise journey toward socialism; the absence of capitalism from its analysis of imperialism; its embrace of a peace movement whose techniques originate in a liberal theory of war; and its acceptance–indeed, its celebration–of China’s robust capitalism. Liberal Bourgeois Communists are nothing if not enthusiastic in their panegyrics to Chinese capitalism as “the world’s greatest anti-poverty machine” and never sparing in their praise of Chinese capitalism for “lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.” In their devotion to capitalism as a cure for poverty they have outmatched even the staunchest Republican.

Approach 2 can be labelled “Communist,” reflecting its resonance with classical Marxist positions.

It is regrettable that some Communist parties have suffered an ideological drift toward positions that the founders of the ICM, Lenin and his colleagues, repudiated.

It is equally regrettable that as self-proclaimed heirs of Marx, these same parties espouse a view of how to ensure a peaceful world that originates, as Waltz argues, not in Marx, but in a liberal bourgeois theory of war.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Subscribe to continue reading

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Subscribe to continue reading

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: