A dying imperialism

DESPITE claims of an imminent threat, the full-blown attack on Iran by the US and Israel represents a decades-long effort to remake the Middle East; an imagined geography of Western fears and desires, as Edward Said famously put it.

- By Devaka Gunawardena

US President Donald Trump

But it also signifies another major rupture in the global order. By attempting to smash the West’s biggest bogeyman in the region, the US and Israel have managed to take their power to its logical conclusion, but also its most brittle end point. Even if the US and Israel achieve narrow tactical successes in their indiscriminate campaign, the reality is that as a method for governing the world, a system predicated on pure force will always be unsustainable.

It took from the start of the Cold War up until the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for the US to build up its image as a global protector of freedom and democracy, regardless of the bloody coups and rapacious anticommunist regimes it backed. But in the aftermath of the most recent attack, even the international Left’s strongest criticisms during that period pale in comparison to the brutal reality of power when exercised by the US, led by a Far Right administration, and its regional counterparts; in this case, Israel. As some have argued, it is as if Trump read Lenin on imperialism and thought it was a good idea.

The stunning surrender of legitimacy means that the buy-in from other powers, even longstanding allies like the Gulf states, is conditional at best. They are already seething at being turned into the frontline. Framed in this way, US power will depend on ever bigger shows of force until the US suffers inevitable defeat somewhere around the world, whether tactically, strategically, or most likely both. This is, to rephrase the English translation of Frantz Fanon’s book on France in Algeria, a dying imperialism.