Tag: history

The US National Security Strategy 2025: Promoting US Billionaires, Stupefying the Working Class, Exploiting Allies, Stifling China

7 December 2025

“The rich, in particular, are necessarily interested to support that order of things which can alone secure them in the possession of their own advantages.”—Adam Smith

“The enemies of the working class travel in private jets, not migrant dinghies.”—Zarah Sultana

By Stephen Gowans

US National Security Strategy documents are expressions of the interests of the world’s richest country in securing that order of things which can alone secure it in the possession of its own advantages. But more specifically, I think it is fair to say, considering that the ultrarich wield outsize influence over the US state, that US strategy is aimed at securing the advantages of the rich themselves directly, and all other Americans incidentally, if at all. Moreover, to the extent the rich are made richer by the Strategy, it may only be a result of the poor being made poorer. In the view of Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many”; of Victor Hugo in The Man Who Laughs: “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor”; and Karl Marx in Capital: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole.” In line with these arguments, we might expect that in proportion as the Strategy makes the lives of the rich richer, it will make those of the working class meaner.

The National Security Strategy 2025 is a plan, as Trump’s White House puts it, “To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come.” We can be sure that when the White House says “America” its means “America’s billionaires,” which the administration includes, in greater numbers than any other in history, and which is openly and unapologetically backed by billionaires and is ardently committed to securing them in the possession of their own advantages, through numerous blessings, from munificent tax cuts, to deregulation, to ample opportunities for corruption.

There are at least a dozen billionaires in Trump’s cabinet and among those appointed to major roles. Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Tom Barrack, Trump envoys working on key foreign policy issues, are confirmed billionaires, as is commerce secretary Howard Lutnick. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent is a near billionaire. David Sacks, a near billionaire, oversees AI and crypto, the industries in which he has accumulated his wealth. [See note 1 below.] The world’s richest people contributed to Trump’s re-election campaign, transition, and inauguration.

“There were at least 17 billionaires in attendance at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, collectively worth more than $1 trillion”, according to The Washington Post. They included the world’s top three wealthiest people: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who “took places of honor next to Trump’s family.” Seated nearby were several other billionaires, including Louis Vuitton, the world’s fifth richest person, “Apple CEO Tim Cook, former Marvel owner Isaac Perlmutter and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.”

Billionaires back Trump because he is, himself, a billionaire—the first ever to hold the office of president; because he has loaded his cabinet with their class brethren, other billionaires, who are sure to see the world as they see it and favor their interests; and because he unapologetically caters to billionaire interests. He does so at the expense of the polloi, while aiming to maintain political and social stability by persuading a substantial fraction of the White Christian working class, that he is, notwithstanding the reality, their champion.

This isn’t to say that a cabinet with fewer or no billionaires, or even completely devoid of people of wealth, would produce a national security strategy that is any less ardently committed to securing an order of things that delivers enormous advantages to the wealthy as its priority. Politicians, whether wealthy or not, are dependent on the rich for campaign contributions and post-political-career opportunities. They naturally try to stay on the good side of the rich, and are greatly inclined to lick their boots, since servility to the wealthy eases the road to office.

In addition, the wealthy exercise an enormous sway over public opinion through their control of mass media, think-tanks, public relations firms, and the research agenda at universities. More importantly, their ownership and control of the economy give them the power to make or break governments.  The only way governments can act against the interests of the wealthy and for the interests of the working class is by taking capital, enterprises, and investment decisions out of private hands and bringing them under democratic control. What this means is that capitalist control of the state is over-determined. It is affected by the participation of members of the capitalist class in key positions of the state and the class’s control of the ideological environment. But it is also affected by the influence the class exercises through its ownership and control of the economy—a power which allows it to cripple governments that fail to promote its agenda by ceasing to invest or by moving capital to other countries. No government wants to lose major investments and will kowtow to investor needs to keep capital flowing. The abundance of billionaires in the Trump administrations is an instance of the wealthy exercising direct control over public policy and the day-to-day decision-making of the White House, but even without billionaires in the cabinet, the manifold indirect influences of the wealthy class on government constrains the state to pursue capitalist class interests.

The Biden administration had far fewer billionaires and people of significant wealth, but its key players were members of billionaire-controlled and -directed think-tanks, such as The Council on Foreign Relations, and were thus loyal servants of the US capitalist class. The Biden administration’s national security strategy was no less committed to defending and promoting US billionaire interests around the world than the Trump administration’s is, though the means of accomplishing this goal and the justifications were not wholly the same. For example, the Trump White House is quite open about using its security strategy to pursue profit-making opportunities for US investors and businesses, while the Biden administration cloaked its pursuit of advantages for US billionaires and corporate America in the language of defending and promoting democracy. The New York Times, virtually the house organ of the Democratic Party, complained in a headline that “Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy“, an allusion to the allegedly loftier aims of the Biden administration’s national security strategy. In 1966, the songwriter Phil Ochs wrote a song about US national security strategy titled Cops of the World, which contained a line that perfectly anticipated the Biden administration’s approach to presenting how it would use the power of the US military to defend and promote the welfare of the US business class. The line was “the name for our profits is democracy.”

Analysis of the Security Strategy

The National Security Strategy 2025 has, for me, five salient themes.

#1. Washington will prevent any rival state from doing the following in the Western Hemisphere:

  • Positioning military “forces or other threatening capabilities”; and
  • Owning or controlling assets that Washington deems strategically vital.

While the document doesn’t spell out who the rival states are, there can be little doubt that they are China and Russia. And while the Strategy doesn’t define what strategically vital assets are, they likely include the Panama Canal and Greenland, at minimum.  The White House has titled the pledge to keep competitors out of the Western Hemisphere, The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine, promulgated by President James Monroe in 1823, warned European powers that the United States would not allow them to acquire new territory in the Western Hemisphere or form alliances with hemispheric states. In exchange, the United States would stay out of Europe’s wars.

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt updated the doctrine with his eponymous Roosevelt Corollary. Washington, the president warned, would intervene in any country in the Western Hemisphere that engaged in conduct of which it did not approve. Roosevelt’s corollary was a statement of the principle of suprema lex regis voluntas—the supreme law of the Western Hemisphere is the will of the US government, and, I would add, as a matter of sociology, the class that dominates it. It was also, obviously, a statement of informal empire.

Trump’s corollary is not so much a corollary as a restatement of the Monroe Doctrine, aimed not at Europe, as the original was, but at Russia and China.

#2. Washington will continue to engage in a struggle with China over control of sea lanes in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The struggle, from Washington’s point of view, will pivot on preventing Beijing from controlling Taiwan.

Washington, along with its court journalists and intellectuals, is fond of pointing out how much of the world’s shipping flows through the South China Sea. “Given that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea,” the document declares, disruptions would have “major implications for the U.S. economy.” Were “a potentially hostile power to impose a toll system over one of the world’s most vital lanes of commerce or—worse—to close and reopen it at will,” the consequences could be catastrophic for the US economy. Hence, no US rival (i.e., China) must be allowed to control this body of water.

The tendentious character of the Strategy’s argument is evident if we consider that much of the shipping that passes through the South China Sea flows to and from China. If any state has an interest in keeping the South China Sea open, China is it. Beijing’s planners can reasonably fear that the United States, a competitor, could impose a toll system over this vital (to China) lane of commerce or—worse—close and reopen it at will, severing China’s imports of oil from the Persian Gulf, impeding the flow of raw materials from around the globe, and blocking its exports to foreign markets.

The United States controls the sea lanes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would like to maintain its control, not because US planners are worried about threats to the US economy if control slips away, but because exercising control over the shipping lanes means leverage over China. US control of critical commercial maritime routes comports with a key goal of the Strategy: “To prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries.” A China that could be blockaded at any moment by the US military, is not likely to grow large enough to surpass the United States as the world’s supreme economic and military power. Hence, Washington has an interest in projecting prepotent military power into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. At the same time, China would like to control the very same maritime routes to protect its own economy from US blockade, disruption, and blackmail, and very likely as well, to gain power over its regional rivals, India and Japan.

The key to this struggle is Taiwan. The Chinese navy is hemmed in by a series of islands, running from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines to the Malay Peninsula, known as the First Island Chain. The islands are under the influence and control, to various degrees, of the US military. The weakest link in the chain is Taiwan. There is no meaningful US military presence on the island, and Beijing claims it as its own territory, but has yet to bring the island under its control. If Beijing achieves its ambition to recover Taiwan, it will be able to more readily project its navy into the South China and Philippine Seas, and from there to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, reducing the chances the US Navy will be able to enforce a blockade.

To keep Taiwan out of Beijing’s hands, Washington proposes to:

  • Preserve “military overmatch”, that is, to deploy greater firepower to the Indo-Pacific region than China can match.
  • Increase the US military presence in the First Island Chain.
  • Press Japan, South Korea, and Australia to increase their contributions of military equipment and personnel to US-led alliances in order to strengthen the US effort to keep China bottled up within the First Island Chain.

The plan is, thus, in large part, the outline of a program to use the US military to obtain an ongoing commercial advantage over China.

#3. Washington will pressure its allies to increase their contributions to the maintenance of US global military supremacy. The Strategy argues that the United States counts among its “many allies and partners dozens of wealthy, sophisticated nations that must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defense.” It goes on to note that “President Trump has set a new global standard with the Hague Commitment, which pledges NATO countries to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and which our NATO allies have endorsed and must now meet.”

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Washington is not asking its allies to assume primary responsibility for their regions. Japan, South Korea, and Australia, for example, are not being asked to defend themselves, or lead military efforts, against China. Instead, they are being asked to spend more money on arms (which, owing to the size of the US arms industry means much of the higher military spending will benefit US merchants of death) and on personnel, all of which are part of formal military alliances under the control of the United States. Ancient Roman armies were comprised of legionaries (soldiers from Rome) and auxiliaries (soldiers from allied states) under the command of a Roman general. When allies committed more soldiers, Rome grew in strength. Washington is simply following the same logic. What allies contribute redounds directly to US military power. Japan, South Korea, Australia, and NATO countries are being asked to contribute more money, more soldiers, and more (mainly US-purchased) equipment to their US-led military alliances; hence, to US military projects and supremacy.

The same is true of Europe. Washington makes a pretense of Europe being asked to take on greater responsibility for its defense. But that’s nonsense. The principal European military organization, NATO, is an alliance that is always under the command of a US general, as the NATO charter stipulates. NATO is a US instrument; it always has been and will always remain. Washington isn’t asking Europe to take command of NATO or the defense of Europe, nor the task of confronting Russia. That remains a US leadership responsibility. It’s being asked, nay, told, to contribute more money and troops to what will always be a US-directed project. This will allow the Pentagon to shift a significant part of its forces currently deployed to Europe to the Indo-Pacific region to help impede China’s efforts to recover Taiwan. The project of confronting Russia will remain one in which Europe contributes the bulk of the equipment and personnel, as it always has done, but it will commit more than in the past, and the US contribution will correspondingly diminish, though US leadership will continue.

Two other points, both significant.

First, it is not the case that Washington believes that Europe has underspent on its militaries and has thus left the continent vulnerable to Russian aggression. On the contrary, the Strategy document declares that “European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons.” This is obvious to anyone who has taken the time to look at the numbers. What this means is that the discourse favored by the news media, NATO’s secretary-general, and some governments, that European countries must increase their military spending, because Russia stands as a looming threat, is utter nonsense. Even the White House doesn’t believe this.

Second, the Strategy seeks to “restabilize” Europe by seeking to bring about an end to the conflict in Ukraine and, importantly, an end to “the reality of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

#4. The White House believes that Europe is imperiled, not by Russia, but by liberal immigration policies and the suppression of White nationalist political parties and their anti-immigrant discourse. “The larger issues facing Europe,” the strategy document opines, “include”: 

  • “Migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife”, and
  • “Censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”

The Strategy’s authors worry that demographic change in Europe is undermining the continent’s Western Civilizational values, noting that it “is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European” (in other words, majority non-White and Muslim). “As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”

The fear of Eastern peoples undermining Western Civilization was a particular concern of the Nazis, who saw Jews and Communists as Eastern. The White House’s concerns about immigration are not only consistent with those of the Nazis and contemporary White nationalist parties in Europe today, but also with the Trump administration’s own racist domestic policy of mass deportations of illegal immigrants and banning immigration from such countries as Afghanistan and Somalia. The Washington Post summarized White House thinking on immigration as: “Somalis are ‘garbage,’ and ‘we don’t want them in our country.’ Migration from ‘all Third World countries’ should be halted. Any foreign national deemed ‘noncompatible with Western civilization’ must be deported.” Like the Nazis, who worked to replace Klassenkampf (the struggle of classes) with Razzenkampf (the struggle of races) in order to divert the working class from its efforts to liberate itself from the miseries and disadvantages of capitalism, the Trump administration is likewise engaged in a project of scapegoating immigrants to keep the White Christian working class from blaming its woes on Trump’s billionaire cohorts and their program of exploitation of the poor and left-behind and indulgence for the rich and comfortable.

#5. The United States will continue to dominate West Asia to ensure the region’s oil resources remain under US supervision, while at the same time maintaining the US position as the world’s top exporter of oil and gas. In this way, Washington will control a vital input into the economies of Japan and Germany, potentially threatening economic competitors, and its top rival, China. Regarding the latter, US strategy stipulates that Washington will control not only West Asia, a major source of energy for China, but also the sea lanes connecting the Middle East to China. This goes a long way toward meeting the major US strategy objective of preventing the emergence of a dominant adversary.

Finally, I will note that, as an obiter dictum, the White House says that it will continue to protect Israel. It doesn’t say why. I can’t help but think that one of the reasons is that Israel is viewed as an outpost of Western Civilization in the East and that, comprising a Jewish master race that is mostly white, it is, as a consequence, a White supremacist regime—one moreover that embodies the most repugnant aspects of the Western tradition (settler colonialism, racism, genocide, imperialism), the very foundations of US wealth and power. Israel is a model of the White nationalist golden age that appears to lie so close to the heart of the US president.  In chiding the Europeans for allowing their continent to undergo an immigration-induced demographic change, and then censuring various European powers for repressing anti-immigrant, White nationalist, discourse, the Trump White House poses as a champion of Western (i.e., White Christian) Civilization. This is a civilization which, under the guidance of Trump and his Corollary, aims to keep Eastern power out of the Western Hemisphere, but claims a prerogative to impose Western power on the East. So it is that while re-asserting the Monroe Doctrine, Washington at the same time makes clear that it intends to control the Eastern Hemisphere, especially the sea lanes that connect China to the rest of the world.

The Indo-Pacific region is very important to the Trump White House. It is, the Strategy notes, “already the source of almost half of the world’s GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP), and one third based on nominal GDP. That share is certain to grow over the 21st century. Which means that the Indo-Pacific is already and will continue to be among the next century’s key economic and geopolitical battlegrounds. To thrive at home, we must successfully compete there.”

Thriving at home can be taken to mean the US billionaire class growing fatter, while it sucks the blood of the US working class, as it endeavors to keep it in a state of stupefaction by recruiting it to a campaign of saving Western Civilization from the immigration of “garbage” from the global south. Concurrently, the US state will plunder the working class of allied countries that will be forced to contribute money, equipment, and personnel to US-led military projects aimed at making Trump’s fellow US billionaires richer. At the same time, Washington will keep its boot-heel on Chinese energy sources and vital sea lanes, aided amply by its allies. This will be done in the service of the White House’s overarching goal: Ensuring that US investors and corporate America secure possession of the lion’s share of the major profit-making opportunities of the Western Hemisphere and Asia. 

The New York Times’ take on the security strategy is that it reflects the “world as seen from the White House”—one in which “America can use its vast powers to make money.” I would amend the assessment somewhat. The strategy reflects a world as seen from a White House that is controlled by a battalion of billionaires, and that uses race and anti-immigrant rhetoric to divert the White Christian working class from the reality that it is being fleeced and immiserated. The world the billionaires see is one in which US investors and major US businesses use the vast power of the US state to cut Chinese enterprises and billionaires out of the action to ensure that the lion’s share of the world’s economic surplus remains in the hands of the Donald Trumps, Steve Witkoffs, Jared Kushners, Howard Luttnicks, and their friends, associates, business and golf partners, and political backers, among them Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—in other words, the US capitalist class.

1. According to The Washington Post, 13 billionaires — including Donald Trump —have held roles in the administration this year. They are:

  1. Donald Trump, President of the United States, Net worth: $5.1 billion
  2. Howard Lutnick, Secretary, Commerce Department, Net worth: $3.2 billion
  3. Linda McMahon, Secretary, Education Department, Net worth: $3 billion
  4. Steve Witkoff, Assistant to the president and special envoy for peace missions, Net worth: $2 billion
  5. Kelly Loeffler, Administrator, Small Business Administration, Net worth: $1.3 billion
  6. Elon Musk, Leader, U.S. DOGE Service (resigned in late May), Net worth: $342 billion
  7. Joe Gebbia, Chief design officer, Net worth: $8.3 billion
  8. Antonio Gracias, Volunteer, DOGE (left in July), Net worth: $2.2 billion
  9. Tilman Fertitta, Ambassador to Italy and San Marino, Net worth: $11.3 billion
  10. Melinda Hildebrand, Ambassador to Costa Rica, Net worth: $7.7 billion
  11. Stephen Feinberg, Deputy secretary, Defense Department, Net worth: $5 billion
  12. Warren Stephens, Ambassador to Britain, Net worth: $3.4 billion,
  13. Paul Atkins, Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission, Net worth: $1.2 billion

The list omits Jared Kushner and Tom Barrack, who may not be billionaires, but near billionaires.

The Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil: Un-American or Part of the US Tradition?

The arrest of Palestinian advocate Mahmoud Khalil for campaigning for an end to the oppression and genocide of Palestinians, would be un-American if the US state were devoted to ending exploitation and oppression. But inasmuch as it is ruled by and for an exploiting and oppressing class, Khalil’s arrest is American to the core.

By Stephen Gowans

March 11, 2025

US president Donald Trump has ordered the arrest and deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and legal permanent resident of the United States, for espousing what Trump denounces as “anti-American views” (which apparently means views at odds with his own.) Khalil’s arrest, Trump promises, is only the first of many. The US president has pledged to deport pro-Palestinian college students on visas who participate in what he deems “illegal” protests (which is to say those the monarch dislikes.) He has also threatened US citizens with permanent expulsion from their universities and their possible arrest for protesting against Israeli apartheid and the Zionist campaign of genocide.

As a student protest organizer at Columbia University, Khalil has been a vociferous advocate of an end to the oppression of Palestinians. This is what counts, to the fervently pro-Israeli Trump, as anti-Americanism. Trump professes to be (without hyperbole for once) the most pro-Israeli president ever. There is no question that he has made signal contributions to the Zionist project of despoiling Palestinians, as well as Syrians in the Golan Heights, of their countries, land, homes, and property—perhaps more than any other president has. As far as Trump is concerned, the rape of Palestine and southern Syria can proceed unhindered except for the resistance of Palestinians and Syrians, and with his unqualified support—not only in the provision of diplomatic and military aid in repressing the native resistance, but also in repressing the resistance at home.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has denounced Khalil’s arrest as “un-American.”  It would be more accurate to say that the detention belies the myth of America; it hardly stands as an exception to the reality of America. Systematically suppressing political advocacy, where it opposes the right of the wealthy to exploit labor, and the prerogative of the strong to take the property of the weak by violence, extortion, or law, has been a regular and predictable feature of US political life since the country’s birth. After all, the United States was built on a policy of manifest larceny—the theft of the country, land, and property of indigenous Americans and the stolen labor of enslaved Africans.

The 1919-20 Palmer Raids (organized by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) saw 6,000 people arrested and 556 deported for expressing views deemed anti-American (advocacy of socialism or opposition to war). Through the late 1940s and 1950s, the US engaged in widespread repression of political speech in what is now called the Second Red Scare. (The first red scare followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution).

The New York Times’ Julian E. Barnes recalled the repression of “anti-American” speech during the First World War.

Congress first passed the Espionage Act in 1917 at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson [in] a bid to quell dissent against the United States’ support for World War I…

In 1918, a set of amendments prohibited speech considered disloyal or abusive to the United States.

During the war, for example, the producer of a film, “The Spirit of ’76,” was prosecuted under the act and sentenced to prison in 1918 because the government believed the movie undermined the British, a World War I ally, and was therefore seditious.

In 1918, Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate for president, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a speech criticizing the wartime draft. [1]

Political speech is regularly repressed in the United States when the business-connected elite that runs the state on behalf of its class believes that the values it defines as “American”—namely, its own—are threatened.

As the philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo explained:

In reality, although protected by the Atlantic and Pacific, every time [the US ruling class] has rightly or wrongly felt imperilled, [it] has proceeded to a more or less drastic reinforcement of executive power and to more or less heavy restrictions on freedom of association and expression. This applies to the years immediately following the French Revolution (when its devotees on American soil were hit by the Alien and Sedition Acts), to the Civil War, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War. Even in our day, the sequel to the attack of 11 September 2001 was the opening of a concentration camp at Guantanamo, where detainees have been imprisoned without trial, and without even being informed of a specific charge, regardless of age. [2]

Losurdo went on the point out that the principals of the US state are energetic critics of rival states that suppress political advocacy in times of crisis–for example during invasions, military occupation, and threats of nuclear destruction (often engineered by the United States itself)–yet ardently repress political advocacy within their own borders in response to crises that are far less formidable than those the United States visits upon enemy states through its aggressions.

The notion may be shocking in light of what we have been taught to believe about the United States, but the truth of the matter is that every state is a police state—the US, and other self-described “free world” and liberal-democratic states, included. States exist both to advance the interests of their society’s dominant class, and to repress the resistance of those who the dominant class exploits. The political advocacy of the resistance is policed by the state, hardly at all when the resistance is weak and quiet, and more openly and viciously when it gathers strength and raises its voice. It is in periods of political tranquility, when the resistance of the exploited class carries on as a largely silent part of everyday life, that the character of the state qua police state is hardly evident, and the state favored by quietude fosters the myth that it is not a police state at all, but a champion of political liberty. It is easy to champion freedom of political advocacy when no one advocates ideas you don’t like, or those who do are voices crying out in the wilderness. But when the quietude of the subordinate class is disturbed, when its voice begins to establish reach, when it mobilizes and its actions become disruptive, the proclivity of the class in control of the state is to repress the militants, coopt the moderates, and threaten the remainder until they return to their accustomed passivity—in other words, the inclination is to reveal the police state for what it truly is. We should not say at these times that this is un-American, or un-Canadian, or un-British, and so on, but that the veil has once again been lifted from the police state because we are once again growing strong.

It’s important to understand that:

  • The US state (hardly alone among capitalist states) represents the interests of its wealthiest citizens and cares only for the interests of the many so far as doing so is necessary to create stable conditions for the tranquil transfer of economic surplus from labor to itself.
  • US domination of West Asia, a strategic and economic area of colossal importance, is significantly aided by the presence in the region of a Jewish settler state committed, by the very demands of its own survival, to repress the Arab and Islamic opposition to both its existence as a state as well as the United States’ existence as a regional tyrant. The relationship of the United States to Israel is one of symbiosis, based on sharing a common enemy, namely, the region’s forces of independence and national assertiveness.
  • The United States is the largest settler colonial state in world history, and is thus predisposed by its own traditions to support other settler colonial states, ceterus paribus; that is, when it makes sense to do so in light of the strategic and profit-making interests of the United States’ wealthiest citizens.
  • Christian Zionists—who believe it is their religious duty to support Israel—comprise a sizeable part of the US electorate. While their views are a matter of indifference to US policy-makers, the reality that they broadly support US policy (one that, unbeknownst to them, is rooted in the economic and strategic interests of the US ruling elite), is helpful in hiding the authentic reasons for US support of Israel behind a democratic facade. It can be said, falsely, that US policy reflects, in large measure, what US voters want. In reality, it reflects what the corporate and finance elite wants.

In light of the foregoing, we can conclude that in the face of growing support for Palestinians, and in the context of increasing opposition to the Zionist project, that the inclination of the US state—despite its professed commitment to liberal democratic values—is to ignore popular opinion and to try to crush political advocacy which contradicts its policy preferences. The myth of America not only includes the notion that the state is committed to free expression and political advocacy, but that it is responsive to popular opinion. The latter myth is contradicted by two important studies.

  • One in 2005 by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, found that “public opinion has virtually no effect on foreign policy, which instead strongly tracks the preferences of internationally oriented corporations, which favor open access to trade and investment abroad. Page and Jacobs noted that experts seemed to have some effect on foreign policy, but that experts are also likely influenced by business groups.” [3]
  • A 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by Page and his fellow political scientist Martin Gilens discovered that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” [4]

In other words, growing popular momentum on behalf of the Palestinians and against their oppression by Israel will not turn US policy-makers into pro-Palestinians or significantly shift US foreign policy. US policy-making and US public opinion operate in non-overlapping spheres, with the former largely immune and indifferent to the latter. To paraphrase George Carlin, US policy-makers and their wealthy backers belong to a club, and 99 percent of US citizens are not in it.

Accordingly, growing support for an end to Zionist apartheid and the genocide against Palestinians will cause officials, not to shift policy in the name of democracy, but to lift the veil from their police state and to crack down on resistance to their preferred pro-oppression policy positions.

Is the state’s aversion to popular opinion and democracy and preference for repression in the face of growing opposition to its conduct, a reason to return to quietude? Hardly. It’s an invitation to look at political struggle realistically, as a class war in which violations of ostensibly cherished rights will happen, as they have always happened, when the latitude of those at the top to exploit and oppress those below is threatened by resistance. Victory is possible only if illusions are shed about the identity of the enemy and its true character. The United States, as much as any other state, is not a paladin of political liberty, but a police state standing on guard for the political and economic interests of its ruling class. For the rest of us, it is a police state, and always has been.

1. Julian E. Barnes, “What Is the Espionage Act and How Has It Been Used? The New York Times, August 15, 2022.

2. Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, Verso, 2015, p. 258.

3. Christopher McCallion, “A Better Foreign Policy Abroad Requires a Strong Labor Movement at Home”, Jacobin, May 30, 2022

4. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, September, 2014.