The political economy of American militarism

"The immediate impetus for the drive to global domination by the US is rooted in the crisis of capitalist accumulation, expressed in the persistent downward pressure on the rate of profit and the failure of the most strenuous efforts over the past 25 years to overcome it. But it is more than this. At the most fundamental level, the eruption of US imperialism represents a desperate attempt to overcome, albeit in a reactionary manner, the central contradiction that has bedeviled the capitalist system for the best part of the last century.

The US came to economic and political ascendancy as World War I exploded. The war, as Trotsky analysed, was rooted in the contradiction between the development of the productive forces on a global scale and the division of the world among competing great powers. Each of these powers sought to resolve the contradiction by establishing its own ascendancy, thereby coming into collision with its rivals."

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"The US conquest of Iraq must be placed within this historical and political context. The drive for global domination represents the attempt by American imperialism to resolve the central contradiction of world capitalism by creating a kind of global American empire, operating according to the rules of the “free market” interpreted in accordance with the economic needs and interests of US capital, and policed by its military and the military forces of its allies.

This deranged vision of global order was set out by Bush in his address to West Point graduates on June 1, 2002. The US, he said, now had the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to “build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.” Competition between great nations was inevitable, but war was not. That was because “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge thereby making the destabilising arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.”

This proposal to reorganise the world is even more reactionary than when it was first advanced in 1914. The US push for global domination, driven on as it is by the crisis in the very heart of the profit system, cannot bring peace, much less prosperity, but only deepening attacks on the world’s people, enforced by military and dictatorial forms of rule.

What then is the way forward? How to fight the drive for global domination by US imperialism and all the catastrophes that flow from it? That is the problem history has presented us with."