WAR LIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF IMPERIALISM

We are surrounded by frightening signs of growing, and increasingly dangerous geopolitical

competition among the Great Powers. When the US House of Representatives finally passed a bill
voting $61bn in military aid to Ukraine on 21 April, Democratic Congresspeople cheered and
waved the Ukrainian flag. But the passage of this long-stalled piece of legislation was about a lot
more than Ukraine. Three other bills were also passed, giving military aid of $26bn to Israel and
$8b for US allies in the Indo-Pacific region, especially Taiwan, and, absurdly, banning TikTok
unless its Chinese owners divest.

The architect of this legislation, the right-wing Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives
Mike Johnson, explained: ‘I really do believe the intel and in the briefings that we’ve gotten,’ from
the CIA and the Pentagon. ‘I believe Xi [Jinping] and Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of
evil. I think they’re in coordination.’ 1

Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman provided a more sophisticated version of this view:
‘Collectively all of this money is intended to push back against four countries that General Chris
Cavoli, the commander of US forces in Europe, describes as an “axis of adversaries”: Russia,
China, Iran and North Korea.’ This mobilization doesn’t just involve the US-led NATO alliance
centred on Europe, but also Japan, South Korea, and Australia. As Rachman explains,

the ‘western alliance’ is now, in reality, a global network of allies that sees itself as engaged
in a series of linked regional struggles. Russia is the key adversary in Europe. Iran is the
most disruptive power in the Middle East. North Korea is a constant danger in Asia. China’s
behaviour and rhetoric are becoming more aggressive, and it can marshal resources that are
not available to Moscow or Tehran.’2

So what exactly is it that this ‘axis of adversaries’ is disrupting? The answer is the so-called ‘rules-
based international order’ that the United States constructed after the Second World War. It
integrated the liberal capitalist states into a bloc under its leadership, bound together by the Bretton
Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), military alliances and
security treaties such as NATO, and the transnational economic networks orchestrated by US
capital. Washington has sought, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, to make this
order global. The export of the neoliberal economic policy regime to the global South during the
1980s and to Russia and Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s was part of this process.

But now the ‘rules-based order’ is struggling with a profound crisis. This was precipitated by the
defeat of the Western occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and by the global financial crisis (GFC)
of 2007-9. US hegemony was discredited by these failures, while the Western imperialist economies
were pushed into ‘secular stagnation’ reflecting a long-term crisis of profitability. Meanwhile, the
ascent of China continued, as it became the biggest manufacturing and trading economy in the
world. The US is now confronted by the most serious ‘peer competitor’ it has faced. The Chinese
leadership is determined to push the US out of the Asia-Pacific region, and is making the necessary
military and diplomatic preparations.

1
Leigh Anne Caldwell and Marianna Sotomayor, ‘The Evolution of Mike Johnson on Ukraine’,
Washington Post, 21 April 2024.
2
Gideon Rachman, ‘Ukraine is the Front Line of a Much Larger Conflict’, Financial Times, 21
April 2024.
The best way of understanding this conflict is on the basis of the Marxist theory of imperialism.
Both David Harvey and I have argued that modern capitalist imperialism arises through the
intersection of economic and geopolitical competition. As the process of capital accumulation
develops, firms grow in size and increasingly operate transnationally, needing the support of their
state; meanwhile, states seek to promote the interests of the capitals based in their territory to give
them the resources to assert themselves against other states. Geopolitical competition among states
is thus subsumed under the process of capital accumulation. The result was the two great imperialist
wars of the first half of the 20th century. 3

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019-20 underlined that the world is entering what I have
called a ‘New Age of Catastrophe’, comparable to the era of the two world wars, the Great
Depression, and the rise and fall of fascism in 1914-45. 4 The failure of the two most powerful
states, the US and China, to cooperate in response to the pandemic underlined the intensification of
their rivalry.

But the pandemic itself marked the most distinctive feature of the present epoch compared to the
earlier Age of Catastrophe – the increasing destruction of nature by capitalism. The most important
aspect is of course climate chaos, which is caused by capitalism’s profound dependence on fossil
fuels. This is expressed in rapidly rising temperatures and the resulting wave of floods, wildfires,
and droughts. But COVID-19 also arose from the same process, as capitalism invades the wild
places of the world and industrializes agriculture, allowing viruses to jump across species till they
reach humans.

We are consequently confronted with a multidimensional crisis of the entire capitalist system. It is,
as we have seen, biological, economic, and geopolitical. But it is also political. The GFC
undermined the mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties that have managed neoliberal
capitalism since the 1980s and 1990s. Unfortunately, the resulting voters’ revolts have mainly
benefited the far right – Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Javier Milei in
Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Marine le Pen in France. The effect has been increasingly to
destabilize liberal bourgeois politics, particularly since many far-right leaders are sympathetic to
Putin.

This is the context in which geopolitical conflict has become more severe. As in the 1930s, a
harsher economic environment increases competition among the Great Powers. The two biggest
economies face crises of overaccumulation. While the US is chronically dependent on financial
bubbles to generate economic growth, the Chinese economy is driven by the need of its huge
manufacturing sector for markets. Washington is battling to preserve its advantage in hi-tech
industries, while Beijing is seeking to upgrade its economy and to lead the green transition. The
trade war between them that Trump started has escalated under Joe Biden, while the European
Union struggles to catch up.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 must be seen against this background. The war
is the toxic product of NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders, Putin’s anxiety to restore Russia’s
imperial glory, and the increasing domination of Ukrainian politics by exclusivist nationalism. It
marks the return of industrialized warfare to Europe. The initial Ukrainian mobilization against the
invasion has been sustained by massive supplies of advanced weapons systems by the US and its
allies. Meanwhile, over time Russia’s advantage in numbers, munitions, and airpower has begun to
tilt the balance in its favour.

3
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Alex Callinicos,
Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).
4
Alex Callinicos, The New Age of Catastrophe (Cambridge: Polity, 2023).
For the US, the Ukraine war is an opportunity to weaken Russia, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin
put it. 5 After Ukraine’s tilt westwards in 2013-14 and Russia’s seizure of Crimea, NATO began
actively training the Ukrainian armed forces, while the CIA reorganized the Ukrainian intelligence
agencies. Washington is waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. 6

US leaders have become much more open in admitting this. For example, Johnson justified his
switch to supporting aid to Ukraine against the opposition of the Republican extreme right: ‘To put
it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys.’ 7 Deploying Western troops
in Ukraine would in any case threaten direct confrontation between NATO and Russia and the
danger of nuclear war. Washington and Berlin, Kyiv’s main backers, have been careful therefore to
keep their military aid within limits that avoid provoking Moscow.

It's very important to understand, however, that Washington’s primary concern is with China, not
Russia. One major reason for backing Ukraine is deter Beijing from seeking forcibly to
reincorporate Taiwan, which has been a Western-backed enclave since the Chinese Revolution of
1949. But the Ukraine War has pushed Russia and China closer together. The rapid imposition of
financial and economic sanctions against Russia by the US and EU after the invasion has proved a
failure. Russia redirected its exports of oil and gas from Europe to China and other big global South
economies such as India and Brazil. Thanks to this, and the pursuit of military Keynesianism by
Putin’s skilful technocrats, the Russian economy is growing faster than any of the G7. Chinese
firms are supplying Russia with the hi-tech goods needed to sustain its war effort.

The failure of sanctions demonstrates the limits of the West’s economic power. But its diplomatic
and ideological influence is also waning. Washington and Brussels failed to mobilize the global
South to isolate Russia. Most alarmingly, some of the closest US allies in the Middle East – Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and even Israel – refused to impose sanctions. In part this reflects
Russia’s role as a major energy exporter in OPEC+ and the role it has played in the region since it
intervened in the Syrian War in 2015. But there is also the huge gravitational pull exerted by China,
now the biggest importer of Gulf oil and gas and the leading manufacturing exporter. The resulting
power-shift was reflected in China’s role in brokering the restoration of diplomatic relations
between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March 2023.

The crisis of Western influence is being exploited by both Chinese President Xi Jinping and
Russia’s Vladimir Putin. They openly present themselves as opponents of the US-dominated order.
They tend to describe their alternative as “multipolarity”, ie an international system with no centre
or hegemonic power. We can discuss its merits. The gaoled Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky has
written a critique of “multipolarity”, which he describes as, in the words of the 17th century
philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a “war of everyone against everyone”. 8

In reality, China and Russia are becoming the leaders of a rival imperialist bloc. This reflected not
only in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but by the pressure that China puts on neighbouring states to
conform to its wishes and accept its territorial demands. But Beijing and Moscow encourage
opponents of US domination. Russia has been able to expand its influence in sub-Saharan Africa
thanks to the growing revolt against French neocolonialism. Thus, after ordering the departure of
French and US troops, Niger has welcomed a Russian military mission. We are confronted with a
growing inter-imperialist struggle.
5
David E Sanger, ‘Behind Austin’s Call for a “Weakened” Russia, Hints of a Shift’, New York
Times, 25 April 2022.
6
Tomáš, Tengely-Evans, ‘Death Rides Out: NATO, Russia, and the War in Ukraine’, International
Socialism, 2.178 (2023).
7
Caldwell and Sotomayor, ‘The Evolution of Mike Johnson on Ukraine’.
8
Boris Kagarlitsky, ‘The Hobbesian World of “Multipolarity”’, Jacobin, 22 April 2024.
The liberal International Relations scholar G John Ikenberry has recently acknowledged that the
Ukraine War marked the splintering of the post-Cold War international order, ‘pushing the world
back in the direction of geopolitical and ideological groupings … the global West, the global East,
and the global South.’ 9 Apologists for the ‘global West’ such as Ikenberry present this as a conflict
between ‘democracy’ and ‘autocracy’. But this is a travesty of the truth. Even before the 7 October
2023 attacks, one major ideological problem the US and the EU were facing was the contradiction
between their enthusiasm for Ukrainian national self-determination and their support for Israel’s
oppression of the Palestinian people. What Joe Biden has called the ‘iron-clad’ commitment to
Israel of the Western liberal imperialist powers while it has slaughtered the people of Gaza and
defied the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court has exposed the
hollowness of their claims to moral superiority over their ‘autocratic’ rivals.

Very soon after the outbreak of the war in Gaza the Financial Times quoted a ‘senior G7 diplomat’:
‘We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South … All the work we have done with the
Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They
won’t ever listen to us again.’ 10 South Africa’s prosecution of Israel for genocide at the ICJ,
followed by Nicaragua’s case against Germany, represents a major ideological reversal, in which
the international law that previously the ‘global West’ imposed selectively on their enemies is now
turned against them and their clients. The result is a huge revulsion against them, not just in the
global South, but among their own populations, as is reflected especially in the Palestine solidarity
movements in the US and Britain.

This isn’t just a moral upheaval. It’s a crisis of Western imperialism. Israel has only been able to
function effectively as a settler colonial enclave thanks to its role as a bridgehead for the dominant
imperialist power in the Middle East – first Britain, then the US. The flow of aid from the West has
provided Israel with the confidence to dispossess the Palestinians and attack its neighbours and the
resources to build up a high-tech military economy. But the basic conflict between Israeli settler
colonialism and Palestinian resistance has continued. Israel’s far-right government is using the 7
October attacks and the objective of destroying Hamas to justify a genocidal war that some at least
hope can clear much or all of Gaza of Palestinians and open the way to more Zionist settlements.

Palestinian resistance and suffering are inspiring worldwide support that puts increasing pressure on
the ‘global West’. The temptation by Israel’s political and military leaders to deflect attention from
their murderous campaign against Gaza by spreading the war by attacking the Islamic Republican
regime in Iran and its close ally Hizbollah in Lebanon is especially dangerous. Johnson’s ‘axis of
evil’ is an ideological fantasy – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are very different regimes
ideologically, politically, and socially. Any coordination among them occurs pairwise and is much
less systematic and institutionalized that the network of alliances orchestrated from Washington.
Nevertheless, Western pressures on them all gives these states an interest in cooperating – with, for
example, Iran supplying missiles and drones to Russia.

The real significance of the new US military aid package is that represent the liberal imperialists’
response – aid, not just for Ukraine, but for their other two bridgeheads in Israel and Taiwan. Rather
than make serious concessions, the ‘global West’ is digging in. One could call this ‘war liberalism’.
This involves military measures – for example, a tighter security pact between the US and Japan,
the extension of the Aukus agreement between the US, Australia, and Britain, the cooperation of the
9
G John Ikenberry, ‘Three Worlds: the West, East and South and the Competition to Shape Global
Order’, International Affairs, 100.1 (2024), pp. 121-2.
10
Henry Foy, ‘Rush by West to Back Israel Erodes Developing Countries’ Support for Ukraine’,
Financial Times, 18 October 2023.
US, Britain, and France in defending Israel from Iranian missiles and drones launched on 13 April
in retaliation for Israel’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Damascus. Biden has stated that US has an
‘iron-clad’ commitment, not just to Israel, but also to the Philippines, which has territorial disputes
with China. War liberalism also involves tightening the screws of repression, as we see in the
attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement. Meanwhile, the trade war is intensifying. The US and
the European Union are taking an increasing number of protectionist measures against Chinese
exports and investments. On 14 May Biden announced a 100% tariff on imports of Chinese
electronic vehicles.

Rachman correctly points out Biden isn’t actively seeking war: ‘Washington is also grappling with
how to strengthen deterrence without getting the US directly involved in a war with any of the axis
of adversaries. In practice, this has often meant providing America’s frontline allies with new
military aid, while simultaneously trying to restrain their actions.’11 One example is the apparently
successful efforts by the US to dissuade Israel from responding to the Iranian bombardment in a
way that could provoke all-out war. But ramping up the military response carries enormous risks,
especially in Ukraine. The slogging match there could easily turn into a more mobile and even
deadlier war as the possibility of a Ukrainian collapse encourages both sides to take risks – for
example, in France’s decision to allow Ukraine to use weapons it supplied to strike Russian
territory. Washington and its allies are gambling with the future of the planet.

But the problem doesn’t arise from the policies of particular governments. Biden has largely
continued Trump’s external policies, demonstrating how far they reflect the interests of US
imperialism at large. The EU is institutionally organized to limit the impact of democratic votes and
thereby to protect capital. The problem is the system that politicians, bureaucrats, and generals
serve – the system of capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination and competition. The
original Marxist theories of imperialism were formulated in the leadup to and during the First World
War. The revolutionary wing of the international socialist movement, led by Lenin and Rosa
Luxemburg, argued that the left shouldn’t support either side in an imperialist war. They should
instead target the system that had produced the war. They took a class approach, arguing ‘The main
enemy is at home’ (Karl Liebknecht) and ‘Turn the imperialist war into a civil war’ between labour
and capital (Lenin).

This is the significance of the present global movement in solidarity with Palestine. The oppression
and resistance of the Palestinians have become a symbol of all the cruelties and injustices wrought
by imperialism. Thus Israeli settler colonialism is closely interwoven with environmental
destruction. 12 In the mass confrontations with the war liberals on campuses or in the streets a new
anti-imperialist left can be forged to take up the struggle against the system pioneered by
Luxemburg, Lenin, and their comrades at the beginning of the 20th century. The New Age of
Catastrophe is also an Age of Revolution.

Alex Callinicos 30 April 2024

11
Rachman, ‘Ukraine is the Front Line of a Much Larger Conflict’.
12
Bana Abu Zuluf, Patrick Bresnihan and Rory Rowan, ‘Decolonising Palestine and Unsettling
Environmental Justice’ (25 April 2024), https://www.rundale.org/2024/04/25/decolonising-
palestine/