Liberals Denounce Insufficiently Procedural Imperialism

Trump said yesterday he believed he would “have the honour of taking Cuba”. Spoken like a true rapist, and a true American.

Sixty-five years of sanctions on Cuba, forty-six on Iran, twenty-one on Venezuela. Sanctions that in every case were imposed and overseen by both Democrats and Republicans and explicitly designed to provoke regime change. So when Trump said “fuck that, it’s obvious what we’re trying to do, I’m going to speed it up,” who can be surprised?

And speed it up he has. Venezuela is done, a US vassal state that will be abandoned when the imperialists are done. Iran is in progress (and thankfully proving more problematic than hubristic imperialist expectations), and Cuba will be next, whether under Trump or another president of the USA.

Trump is not an aberration. He’s the logical conclusion to decades of sanctions and imperialist posturing. He’s the inevitable trigger man. If it wasn’t him starting these wars and conducting these coups, it would be someone else. Because militarism and imperial dogma transcends party or the narrow and distracting social ideologies that masquerade as democracy. The US is always building towards violence. Always. Precisely how it is expressed, and who expresses it, are the only unknowns.

And liberals who pretend not to get it, who pretend Trump is an outlier, who luxuriate in the myth of American benevolence and freedom and values, are the worst. From AOC, to Mamdani, to Sanders to Newsom, it is Democrats voting for sanctions, applying the de-legitimising “regime” descriptor and denouncing resistance to imperial aggression who prep the intellectual, rhetorical and material ground for imperialism. It is liberals who in their language of universal rights at home provide American brutality abroad with a sheen of benign, bookish justification.

None of them truly opposed the kidnapping of Maduro, the sanctions on Cuba or the war on Iran. I’ve checked, and not one Democrat has spoken out against Trump for his Cuba comments. In the case of Iran, now it’s going badly, some of them are worming their way to the surface and arguing the US should have continued to slowly choke the people through economic warfare rather than kill them quicky with Tomahawk missiles. People like Chris Murphy who say Trump’s strategy is “incoherent and incomplete” or Cory Booker who argue against it on the basis it doesn’t have Congressional approval.

Bookish American imperialists dislike only that Trump makes the USA look incompetent and insufficiently procedural, not that he’s authorising the mass slaughter of innocents and attempting to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation. And none of them argue against the extraordinarily dangerous norm the US-Israel is setting by assassinating heads of state and government officials.

Then you’ve got the frauds like Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center who just resigned over the war. A MAGA devotee and former special forces grunt who pulled the trigger for US imperialism in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, his resignation wasn’t about ethics or principles. In his resignation letter he praised Trump’s 2020 assassination of the then-IRGC head Soleimani. “Trump was doing imperialism right now he’s doing it wrong,” was essentially Kent’s message. And if Iran had folded in a few days like the pack of cards Trump had been led to believe it was, Kent would still be sucking the teat. Kent is an unprincipled rat fleeing a sinking ship hoping it helps him win the congressional seat he’s failed twice to win. His resignation supports the narrative that this is a disastrous war provoked by Israel, but it won’t change the arc of US imperial violence.

But we can’t put all the blame on the US, as tempting as it is.

The project of imperialism is a western venture.

Yesterday, with Israel invading southern Lebanon, expelling hundreds of thousands from their homes and levelling residential apartment blocks in Beirut, Germany’s Merz was denouncing Hezbollah for the violence and for fighting back against Israel. This of course is the precise script the entire west has been running over Iran, condemning them for fighting back against the countries assassinating their leaders and unleashing chemical attacks on their people.

While Trump talks about “taking” Cuba, Merz, Starmer, Macron and the rest also adopt the language of the abuser by denouncing the victims for fighting back.

And all of these inversions of reality, all of this expansionist imperial violence is supported by mainstream media who apply linguistic propaganda to buttress illegal acts.

The Washington Post calls Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the “expansion of the war in Iran” rather than the violation of a sovereign border. The Guardian refers to the Israeli invasion as “a ground campaign.”

Calling it an invasion, while truthful, would imply aggression and violation.

Campaign is the perfect term because it implies limitation. It implies procedure.

And if there’s one thing liberals can agree on, it’s that solid procedure makes for the best imperialism.

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