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u s imperialism
Biden Bolstered the US Empire Only to Hand it Off to a Fascist
Rather than considering what it would mean for Trump to take control of the most powerful empire in the world, the Biden administration has spent more time considering how to ensure the empire’s survival.
Nov 15, 2024
One of the lasting legacies of U.S. President Joe Biden will be that he reinvigorated the American empire despite the risk of an increasingly authoritarian Donald Trump returning to lead it.
Over the past four years, President Biden has continually ignored criticisms of U.S. empire and the dangers it poses to the world to direct the empire’s expansion. He has overseen the enlargement of NATO, the exploitation of Ukraine to weaken Russia, a military buildup in the Indo-Pacific to encircle China, and the backing of Israel’s military assaults across the Middle East.
The Biden administration spent the past four years rebooting the American empire, bolstering U.S. imperial power while making some its most brazen moves in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East.
To this day, the Biden administration boasts about its imperial maneuvers, even with the knowledge that a far more dangerous Trump administration will soon be in a position to exploit U.S. imperial power for its own purposes.
“I think we’ve done remarkable things,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin marveled on November 7, two days after the election. “We were able to manage challenges and resources—and I think that put us in a pretty good place.”
Rebooting the Empire
When President Biden first entered office in January 2021, one of his top priorities was to restore the global American empire from the chaos of the first Trump administration. Seizing upon the imperial trope of the United States as an organizer of the international system, Biden spoke about the need for the United States to restore order to a chaotic world.
“We are the organizing principle for the rest of the world,” Biden said in 2022.
Despite some initial failures, including the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, the Biden administration achieved many of its imperial goals, such as the revitalization of U.S. alliances, a major strategic advantage of the United States over its rivals.
Trump has repeatedly asserted that the United States is a nation in decline, seizing upon President Biden’s cognitive decline and some of his imperial failures to insist that the United States is no longer respected. Soon, however, he will find himself in a position to lead a resurgent empire.
After all, the Biden administration spent the past four years rebooting the American empire, bolstering U.S. imperial power while making some its most brazen moves in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East.
The Transatlantic System
The Biden administration has significantly reinforced U.S. power in Europe. Although Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has posed a major challenge to the U.S.-led transatlantic system, the Biden administration has turned the situation to its advantage.
Since the start of the Russian invasion, the Biden administration has worked to enlarge and empower NATO, bringing more countries into the alliance while increasing its spending on military operations. There are now more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers stationed across Europe, the largest number since the mid-2000s.
The Biden administration has also taken advantage of the war to weaken Russia. By arming the Ukrainian resistance and imposing powerful sanctions on the Russian economy, the United States has led a concerted effort to entangle Russia in a quagmire. The administration’s basic approach has been to provide Ukraine with enough military assistance to hold its positions against Russia but not enough to push Russia out of the country. According to Austin, the primary reason why Ukrainian soldiers have been able to keep fighting is “because we have provided them the security assistance to be able to do it.”
Despite the approximately 1 million casualties on both sides, administration officials have insisted upon maintaining their approach, prioritizing their goal of making the war into a strategic failure for Russia over the ideal of safeguarding the security and sovereignty of Ukraine.
“What we’ve witnessed and I think what the world has witnessed is a declining superpower in Russia making one of its last-ditch unlawful efforts to go in and seize territory,” State Department official Richard Verma said in September. “This is really a declining power in so many ways and frankly not a very effective military power.”
The Transpacific System
While the Biden administration has strengthened the U.S. position in Europe, it has also reinforced the U.S. position in the Indo-Pacific. Even as China has pushed back against the U.S.-led transpacific system, especially in the South China Sea, the United States has strengthened many of its advantages over China.
One of the Biden administration’s major moves has been to build out the U.S. hub-and-spoke model, the U.S.-led imperial structure that keeps the United States positioned as the dominant hub of the Pacific. Not only has the administration fortified the spokes, or the U.S. allies and partners that encircle China, but it has facilitated multilateral cooperation among the spokes, mainly by working through the Quad and other regional groupings.
In a related move, the Biden administration has intensified U.S. military operations across the region. An estimated 375,000 U.S. soldiers and civilian personnel now operate across the Indo-Pacific, forming the highest concentration of U.S. military service members in a region that extends beyond the United States.
President Biden’s legacy will be the handover of a resurgent American empire to “the most dangerous person” in America.
“In the Indo-Pacific, I think we are seeing a resurgent United States,” Defense Department official Ely Ratner commented last year.
Complementing its military moves, the Biden administration has bolstered U.S. economic power. As it has worked to decouple China from multiple sectors of the U.S. economy, it has spearheaded the formation of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which reinforces the U.S. position as the center of economic power in the Pacific.
“Contrary to the predictions that the PRC would overtake the United States in GDP either in this decade or the next, since President Biden took office, the United States has more than doubled our lead,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan boasted in October.
The Middle East
Of all the signs of a resurgent American empire, however, perhaps none is more telling than U.S. action in the Middle East. Over the past year, the Biden administration has made it clear that the United States is more capable than ever to spread havoc and destruction across the region.
Since Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, the Biden administration has openly backed Israel’s military assaults across the Middle East, all with little consequence for the United States. The Arab states in the region may have once countered Israel by going to war or organizing oil embargoes against the United States, but they have done little to deter the United States from backing Israel’s military operations. In fact, the Arab states are now more likely to come to Israel’s defense, just as they did when they helped Israel counter Iran’s missile attacks in April and October.
The Biden administration may sometimes criticize Israel for how it has conducted its military operations, especially given the fact that Israel has laid waste to Gaza, but through it all, administration officials have been quietly satisfied with how they have enabled Israel to conduct military operations without facing any major retaliation. The Biden administration’s imperial management of the region demonstrates that the United States is now so powerful that it can unleash its strategic asset on the Middle East without having to engage in a wider war.
“I think we’ve done a magnificent job there,” Austin mused earlier this month, taking pride in U.S. imperial achievements while displaying little concern for the people of Gaza or the Israeli hostages who are still being held by Hamas.
The Future Under Trump
As the Biden administration has recharged the American empire, it has never stopped to question its actions. Not even internal dissent within the State Department and other federal agencies over the administration’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza has led to any kind of reckoning over the manner in which it has employed imperial violence around the world.
Perhaps most telling has been the Biden administration’s response to charges that Trump is a fascist. Top administration officials have agreed with the assessments, some made by leading scholars of fascism and others issued by former high-level officials in the first Trump administration. But leaders in the Biden administration have never questioned their belief that they must do everything they can to strengthen the U.S. empire.
Rather than considering what it would mean for a fascist to take control of the most powerful empire in the world, the Biden administration has spent more time considering how to ensure the empire’s survival. In recent months, one of its top priorities has been to “Trump-proof” the empire, meaning that administration officials are searching for ways to ensure that U.S. imperial structures survive the chaos of a second Trump presidency.
Now that Trump’s reelection is here, however, the Biden administration is facing a far more disturbing reality. President Biden’s legacy will be the handover of a resurgent American empire to “the most dangerous person” in America, all with dire implications not just for the people who are targets of Trump’s wrath but for the many people around the world who are victims of U.S. imperial practices.
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At COP29, Let’s Demand Accountability From the Military-Industrial Complex
Exempt from transparency requirements within U.N. climate agreements, the military sector is, in fact, the leading institutional driver of the climate crisis.
Nov 11, 2024
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that the first two months of the Israeli war on Gaza released the carbon output of 26 countries. The actual figure is more than 20 countries, and the article has been updated to reflect this.
As we write, New York City is an unsettling 70°F in November. Meanwhile, a cohort of war profiteers, their pockets lined by the very industries destroying our climate, are flying to COP, the annual United Nations climate summit hosted by a petrostate, no less. They’re gathering to “discuss climate solutions”—but one of the world’s biggest contributors to the climate crisis will be entirely overlooked: the U.S. military-industrial complex.
The world’s largest institutional emitter, the U.S. military, sits beyond the reach of the metrics meant to hold countries accountable for climate pollution. Exempt from transparency requirements at the COP or within U.N. climate agreements, the military sector is, in fact, the leading institutional driver of the climate crisis. It burns through fossil fuels on a scale that surpasses entire nations while waging wars that destroy lives, communities, and the land itself. It’s a deliberate omission, one meant to hide the environmental and social costs of militarism from view.
Leading the U.S. delegation to COP is John Podesta—a career defender of militarism, a lobbyist who has worked to fortify the very military establishment poisoning our air, water, and land. Now, he arrives in the conference halls of COP wrapped in a cloak of environmentalism. Yet, as long as he skirts around the elephant in the room, no amount of recycled paper or energy-efficient lighting at COP will address the core driver of the climate crisis. If Podesta ignores the environmental impact of U.S. militarism, he’ll be dooming us.
Each weapon shipped, each tank deployed, is an environmental crime in the making, one funded by American tax dollars.
For those of us directly feeling the crisis, there’s no question that the U.S. Empire’s military machine is central to our climate emergency. Appalachians living through floods and those of us in New York watching temperatures soar out of season are witnesses to the toll. And yet we watch as our leaders, claiming to care about climate, push forward with policies and budgets that only deepen our climate emergency.
In the past year alone, the war on Gaza has been a horrifying example of militarism’s environmental toll. Entire communities were leveled under the firepower of U.S.-funded bombs. In just two months, emissions from these military activities equaled the yearly carbon output of more than 20 countries. This violence bleeds beyond borders. U.S. police forces train with the Israeli military, and they’ll soon bring their war tactics to Atlanta’s Cop City, where a training center is planned on sacred Indigenous land. Militarism is woven into every facet of our society—taking lives, razing homes, and desecrating land—all while stoking climate disaster.
This crisis can’t be solved by those who are its architects. It can’t be fixed by Podesta’s well-crafted speeches or the administration’s empty pledges. The Biden administration just passed one of the largest military budgets in history, pumping more dollars—and more carbon emissions—into the climate catastrophe. Each weapon shipped, each tank deployed, is an environmental crime in the making, one funded by American tax dollars. We can’t ignore this fact as COP progresses and climate talks fall short yet again.
It’s easy to despair in the face of such unaccountable power. But in times of crisis, clarity can become a weapon. We must expose the truth that militarism is antithetical to climate justice. True climate solutions don’t come from polite panel discussions led by those who wield the tools of destruction. They come from radical honesty and demands for accountability. They come from a commitment to ending the empire choking our planet and communities. And they come from a shared goal of mutual liberation that doesn’t ignore the plight of the many to serve the few.
The cost of militarism is clear, and its environmental toll demands our fiercest opposition. This COP, let’s not let the elephant in the room fade into the background. It’s time for those responsible for our climate crisis—the war machines, the lobbyists, and the industries that back them—to be held accountable. For our survival and for each other, we must demand climate justice that tells the truth.
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Our Feminist Future Must Include a Liberated Palestine
The co-opted war mongering feminism of this era is leading us down a path that puts all women who aren’t in the ruling class in the line of fire.
Oct 24, 2024
In 30 years, on some fall morning like today, we wake up and turn on the news. No one is talking about banning abortion or “legalizing abortion” because we don’t talk about wombs like they exist to be legislated around anymore. Instead they are announcing the closing of U.S. military bases in the Pacific, and returning the land to its stewards. Once places of pollution, sexual violence, and war buildup, these bases are something else now. And all over the South of the United States, communities have been given billions of billions of dollars to replace their infrastructure to better protect against natural disasters.
For a couple decades, the world has been working together to slow climate emissions; the only competition is who can save the world the fastest. Something that seemed unfathomable 30 years ago, when Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton destroyed Florida and North Carolina and when the government sent money to Israel for genocide instead of sending money to hurricane relief. Palestinians rebuilt Gaza, and people born in Gaza are free to visit their families in Jerusalem, Tulkarem, or Beitunia. The apartheid walls finally came down.
Any devastating moment can be the one that makes us change course in this timeline—natural disasters or coming to the brink of a world war could have been it. From the bottom up, the people demanded better priorities. Feminists thought holistically about what women ought to demand. If war and imperialism are killing women and children directly through bombs and indirectly through climate destruction, then feminists ought to demand an end to war. So they did. The money that was so tied up in the war industry every year, over $1 trillion, flowed into communities to meet beyond their most basic needs.
If we can see little glimpses of the world we want to live in by just being with each other, then we are tangibly moving in the right direction.
The world and its people have a sense of stability. We are all less filled with anxiety and trauma. That’s an example of the feminist future we can imagine.
If utopia is a world where uteruses can’t be legislated or Palestinians can move freely throughout their land, then we are guilty of being utopians. Having a social imagination is useful because we can’t start walking somewhere if we have no idea where we are going, or else we risk walking in the complete opposite direction. The “feminism” of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, or any other woman of the ruling class has no vision for the future because their feminism very plainly endorses the status quo of endless war and capitalism. This brand of feminism might make it so women have the right to an abortion, but with no way to afford one if they need it, for example. We argue that the co-opted war mongering feminism of this era is leading us down a path that puts all women who aren’t in the ruling class in the line of fire. And we also argue that we can practice our feminist values to create a crawl space to reach a feminist future.
Any dehumanization is antithetical to feminist values. “Feminists” who haven’t said a word about the genocide in Gaza are leaving out Palestinian women—thus dehumanizing an entire population of oppressed people and giving discursive cover for a genocide. If you look at any atrocity at any moment in time, there were people, even “feminists,” justifying those atrocities and injustices. Even if they don’t mention Palestine at all and only discuss abortion rights, omitting it from their demands demonstrates dehumanization all by itself. They are saying aloud who is important to them and who is not.
With each exclusion, the war machine and patriarchy (they are the same thing) will just go to the next oppressed group of people that feminists are willing to leave behind. The first weekend of November, a Women’s March, hoping to stir the women into the streets like it did in 2017, is planned. It declares it is a feminist movement: “By 2050, we will be a feminist-led movement that ensures anyone and everyone has the freedom to lead empowered lives in safety and security in their bodies, in their communities, and throughout the country.” We wonder if our feminist vision should demand a little bit more, and if it’s really useful to have a vision that only includes “the country.” In a globalized world where our “country” has over 700 military bases and supplies weapons for every major conflict, don’t feminists within the U.S. owe a vision that transcends borders? If our oppression flows to every inch of the Earth, so should our solidarity.
Patriarchy is a stomach that is never satiated and is constantly looking for people to swallow up, so it encourages us and pressures us to leave people behind. At this present moment, we are being encouraged by Western feminists to put women in the U.S. ahead of women in Gaza, even when we see videos of pregnant Palestinian women being shot in the street. Western feminists are insisting we try to race to the top, leaving our sisters in Gaza ailing and starving in our dust. Unless part of the ruling class, Western feminists gain nothing by excluding Palestinian women from their politics and future aspirations. Without the practice and value of true solidarity, they will leave everyone living under the boot of capitalism and imperialism in the dirt.
Having a social imagination is key to our feminist world view. To quote Bill Ayers’ new book, When Freedom is the Question, Abolition is the Answer, social imagination is “the collectively creative, inventive, resourceful forces that embrace all of humanity and are explicitly pro-emancipation and pro-liberation for the many, for all.” Any feminist framework that doesn’t include the masses lacks what is necessary for social imagination.
Here’s what Western feminists are presented with: women in the Senate, women in the House of Representatives, and women in “power” vaguely. Let’s zoom in at the women in Congress who CODEPINK has been educating on the plight of women in Gaza for years now. When confronted with the reality of the human suffering they knowingly support and materially make possible, people like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shake their fists at us and insist they are focusing on the issues facing women here in the U.S. Not only is Western feminism exclusionary, it also thinks you’re stupid. Congress, and women like Pelosi, have had multiple opportunities to codify abortion rights in the United States. During this time, and in the last year, these same women have promised ironclad support for the genocidal state of Israel as it destroys families and sexually abuses Palestinian women and men.
So, what have these “feminists” in power delivered for the people? They give us an image of a woman sitting in the seat of power and “breaking the glass ceiling.” Is having a woman who sat where a man once sat to vote in favor of the same austerity or war spending that the man voted for “breaking the glass ceiling”? Sure. But, what about that is meaningful if the walls that hold up the ceiling keep the masses in poverty, trauma, and war? Feminists seek to tear the walls down altogether.
A plea for the status quo (that includes institutional violence against women) is not liberatory nor is it an example of social imagination. Liberatory values like feminism are all-encompassing, they are aspirational and inspiring. Above all, they are rooted in love.
We want a different future. So, what’s the alternative to exclusionary, Western feminism that doesn’t mind Palestinian women being murdered en masse as long as maybe, one day, they can codify the right to an abortion in one, singular country?
It’s feminism—feminism in practice, feminism that truly believes every person deserves dignity in this life. Feminism that can actually imagine and cultivate a future worth living to.
To begin to break out of the racial capitalist patriarchy is to begin practicing feminist values in our everyday lives. At CODEPINK, we call this moving from the war economy to the peace economy. Here are five simple steps you can start taking today:
- Talk to and meet a new stranger every day. On the bus, at a cafe, on the street. Anywhere. Get outside
- Practice curiosity. When you hear information relayed to you about another person or issue, ask why that might be the case, or even if that’s the case at all. Curiosity can help us sift through mass media and interpersonal drama with a more critical lens.
- Practice patience. Remind yourself to not be condescending to people who know less than you about politics or anything at all!
- Practice generosity. When we live from a place of abundance, we are actively rejecting the scarcity the war economy instills in us.
- Practice all-encompassing care. You care about the people directly around you. But you also care about the people around them, and then the people around them. You can’t possibly have a feminism that is exclusionary if your empathy reaches everywhere.
- Read about more practices and our support of you at codepink.org/peaceeconomy
Yes, the atrocities the U.S. government carries out in our name aren’t necessarily our fault. Our politicians are bought off and don’t represent the people, we know that. But practicing our values as we build our movements is critical. If we can see little glimpses of the world we want to live in by just being with each other, then we are tangibly moving in the right direction.
This constant practice of our feminist values makes sure no one gets left behind and prevents our movement from being sucked into co-option. In the U.S., our struggle is with our own government’s priorities. They thrive on getting rich from war and the power they draw from it. They never had and never will be concerned with life, ours or the planets. When our government’s oppression spans the entire world, the people’s struggle is always one.
So, when we imagine a world where our priorities shift to the people, and we look past the horizon and over the Mediterranean, there is also a liberated Palestine.
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