A Decisive Moment in the Decline of Western Imperialism
The old colonial powers are siphoning resources toward war and the protection of capital. Fascism is rearing its head...
From Paweł Wargan:
We are witnessing tectonic changes in the international system on a scale unseen in generations — and much of the West remains willfully blind to this epochal process or what it means for the future of humanity.
To understand this moment, we need to turn back to World War I, a vicious inter-imperial conflict fought for the spoils of colonial loot.
That war, which slaughtered over sixty million working people, both gave the impetus to the October Revolution in Russia and revealed the unspeakable brutality of an international order dominated by colonial and imperial rule.
In 1919, the Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World put forward a clear analysis of what that war, often remembered as the "Great War" in the West, really meant to the world's colonized and working people:
"The colonial populations were drawn into the European war on an unprecedented scale. Indians, Blacks, Arabs and Malagasy fought on the territories of Europe—for the sake of what? For the right to remain the slaves of Britain and France. Never before has the infamy of capitalist rule in the colonies been delineated so clearly; never before has the problem of colonial slavery been posed so sharply as it is today."
In standing against imperialist war — and openly backing the world's colonized peoples — the world's first proletarian state emerged as a potent threat to the West.
That is why, towards the end of WWI, the powers of the Entente, including US and UK, invaded Russia in support of the White Army. Some 20 nations entered the war in an attempt to preserve bourgeois rule and stop the emergence of a socialist state.
The Entente failed to restore capitalism in Russia. But Nazi Germany would soon pick up the baton.
Communism was Hitler's first target. Germany, Hitler promised in 1935, would stand as “the bulwark of the West against Bolshevism.” He enjoyed the sympathies of the Western ruling class and received considerable support from them until the start of the war and in some cases beyond it.
It was France and the UK that repeatedly rebuffed Stalin's invitation to form a grand anti-fascist alliance. They rejected his offer to send a million troops to defend Poland against invasion. Britain's ruling class did not conceal its preference for Nazism over Communism, and openly financed Mussolini while accommodating Hitler.
The West's cynical position was most concisely expressed by future US president Harry S. Truman. “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia. And if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible,” he said on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, which would claim 27 million Soviet lives.
The war of extermination waged by the Nazi regime sought nothing less than the colonization of Eastern Europe and the enslavement of its people, aiming to conquer the “Wild East” just as US settlers had conquered the “Wild West.”
In this way, Nazism carried forward the European colonial tradition — the same tradition we saw in India and Congo and Namibia before it engulfed Europe — against the emancipatory promise unleashed in October 1917.
Collectively, the Soviet Union and China lost nearly 50 million lives defeating imperial Germany and imperial Japan. The US and UK, by comparison, lost under a million.
By the end of the war, the USSR and China were in ruins. Europe was dramatically weakened. But the US emerged economically strengthened — a major industrial power with its sights on global supremacy. "Preponderant power," a 1947 State Department memo said, must be the objective of US foreign policy in the post-war era.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that ambition was backed by the terrible power of the atom. The US would use nuclear blackmail to achieve diplomatic and military objectives on many occasions in the decades that followed. The bomb gave white supremacy seemingly supreme power.
The Soviet economy, for some time the only supporter and guarantor of anti-colonial liberation movements globally, was now faced with two burdens that would profoundly distort its development.
First, it had to recover from the devastation of the war. Second, it had to catch up to the US militarily. In a remarkably short time-span, it achieved both, but external pressures and internal contradictions would soon force it into retreat.
Meanwhile, the Western imperialist powers consolidated. Inter-imperialist rivalry made way for a collective imperialism, exercised through institutions like NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the European Union, and others, in what Samir Amin called the "Triad" — a group of states largely made up of US, EU, and Japan.
That collective imperialism — headed by the US and acting primarily for its benefit — waged a ceaseless hybrid war both against the communist East and the rising liberation movements in the South.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the West accelerated and renewed that assault through a combination of re-dollarization, sanctions, debt, military aggression, and ideological warfare. This attack served to expand monopoly capitalism into new frontiers, crushing aspirations for political sovereignty in the process.
Since World War II, over 20 million people were killed directly by that war. But that number must also include the hundreds of millions whose lives were cut short by enforced underdevelopment. Tens of millions of people die each year because they lack healthcare, housing, food, or clean water. These deaths must be attributed to imperialism because movements towards socialism and national sovereignty largely eradicated their causes.
The collapse of the USSR totalized the imperialist war on humanity, as its mechanisms seeped into every crevice and pore of a fragmenting and disoriented world — often underwritten by brute military aggression.
Among many things, this is why many nations in the Global South have seen a collapse in popular movements and a rise in NGOs — ideological weapons, funded by institutions like NED and USAID, designed to demobilize society and organize its elites towards collaboration.
This is what many call the "unipolar" moment.
Today, that moment is unravelling.
The instruments deployed to subjugate the world in the 1970s and 1980s are becoming ingredients in the West's decline.
The use of sanctions is seeing the emergence of new infrastructures for financial exchange outside the sphere of imperialist control. The weaponization of the dollar is seeing states increasingly use regional currencies. The imposition of debt is seeing the rise of alternative financial institutions, chiefly led by China, that offer preferential terms to the world's underdeveloped nations.
And, from Russia's Special Military Operation to Hamas's Al-Aqsa flood, nations and peoples are increasingly willing to take a material stand against imperial military encroachment and occupation. Today, the US is financially over-leveraged, militarily overextended, and, especially after Gaza, ideologically spent.
Taken together, these developments explain the emboldening of the Global South: the increasingly militant language from diplomats and heads of state, the willingness to entertain new political alliances and projects, the rejection of US militarism and economic control. As a whole, the West is increasingly isolated on the world stage.
In other words, we are witnessing a decisive moment in the decline of Western imperialism, which has held humanity in its grip for the better part of five centuries — and has driven the planet to the brink of collapse in our own.
This explains the panic we are seeing from Brussels to Washington. The West cannot marshal its economic might towards the betterment of society, or even towards technological innovation capable of competing with China. That would require a profound and fundamental challenge to the preeminence of private property.
So the old colonial powers are siphoning resources toward war and the protection of capital. Fascism is rearing its head, and fresh crosshairs are being painted on nations seeking to embark on the path of sovereign development.
But, with the rise of China, the West's capacity to carry out its agenda are severely diminished. It appears that the Trump administration understands this, and is recalibrating US grand strategy for a new era of confrontation. Meanwhile, the institutions and alliances that kept imperialism united since World War II are beginning to crumble.
Like the 20th century, which delivered much of the world from the grips of colonial rule, the 21st promises to end imperial domination for good. Indeed, it must — there is no other way to pull the planet back from climate collapse or nuclear war.
But that outcome depends on our capacity to organize and raise the political consciousness of millions of people. The odds are in our favor. History shows us that this is not only possible, but more realistic than expecting the imperialist ruling class to build a just and sustainable world from the ashes of the fires that it ignited.
