Hegemony

The One Word Explanation for Endless War

Back in 1990 I was at my first meeting with the full staff of the Greenpeace Toxics Campaign. I was a new hire, still fairly naive in general, and very impressed by what was happening around me in those rooms. One of my colleagues, a country boy from Oklahoma, liked to preface what he said with, “I’m just a dumb Okie but….” He would often then go to say something truly brilliant. At one point early in the meeting he got up to present on campaign strategy and he simply looked at us and said “Hegemony. This is a word we need to know and pay attention to.” I recall thinking at the time that the comment seemed more than a little tangential to our Toxics Campaign mission. I look back now and realize that he was just a lot more dialed in to the big picture than I was.

Hegemony: Domination. The political, economic, and military predominance of one state over other states, either regional or global.

It has taken me a long time, virtually a lifetime, to begin to fully appreciate that way in which that one word characterizes the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy. Recent examples show it clearly. Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba were all willing to dialogue and negotiate with the U.S. The two most recent attacks on Iran happened as negotiations were taking place, with this most recent attack coming literally hours after Iran had agreed to sweeping U.S. demands regarding its nuclear program.

Nicolás Madero had long expressed willingness to hold talks. In their book, On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle, Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad find that, “At no point in its post-1959 history did Cuba resist opening channels to the U.S. and finding ways to normalize diplomacy.” But for the U.S. it was never about good faith negotiation. Never about actual threats to Americans.

What all three of these countries have in common is opposition to Western imperialism. What they were not willing to do was capitulate completely to U.S. domination.

Iran

This new war on Iran is an old war. The U.S. has a sordid legacy of military and economic intervention in Iran, including the overthrow of the country’s first democratically-elected president (on behalf of British Petroleum and easy access to Iran’s oil resources). Surprise, surprise, it has long been about oil!

With the compass set on hegemony, of course the U.S is going to operate outside of law, that’s kind of the point. The project of U.S. hegemony has long been a bi-partisan effort and it was destined to reach this stage. Trump took the wrapping off and exposed the naked violence at its core. We would do well to understand that the law of the jungle now reigns as we confront the reality of a fascist regime.

As Reed Brody explained on Democracy Now!, the Nuremberg Trials determined aggression to be the supreme international crime. An unprovoked and unauthorized (by the UN Security Council) war is an international war crime. It is also the exact opposite of what those in the know said was needed in Iran to support the pro-democracy movement. Since all of that was clear, it is not hard not to conclude that this latest attack is primarily about two morally-bankrupt leaders interested in self-preservation, à la the Epstein War and the Netanyahu variation.

But this war on Iran is but the continuation of the long and costly project of U.S. imperialism and global hegemony. And we don’t do justice to the future of life on Earth by ignoring that bigger picture. Why? Because in the context of the Great Unravelling, the continuation of that project will only get more desperate, deranged, and dangerous.

The lens of hegemony also gives us a way to evaluate the morality and political character of the Democratic Party and its individual members. In this latest attack on Iran, the leadership and others have been criticized for opposing it merely on procedural grounds.

Cuba

The amplification of aggression against Cuba and push for regime change, may look like “Marco Rubio’s War,” but it too is just a continuation of the hegemonic project. It was post-revolutionary Cuba’s refusal to continue to be a resource colony of the U.S. that initiated our now decades-long history of military intervention and economic warfare. The U.S. has long dominated the entire Western Hemisphere economically and militarily. But here again, in the context of the unravelling of the climate and the fight over limited resources, hegemony must mean complete domination and control. Thus we have the kidnapping of Maduro and the take-over of the Venezuelan oil fields. We have the escalation of hostilities not only against Cuba but other progressive governments in the region, namely Colombia and Mexico.

A lot can be said right now about Cuba and the suffering the U.S. has long imposed on its people. What I want to highlight is also historical but related to Cuban resilience and what Cuba can teach us in the context of the Great Unravelling.

Beginning in 1991, an extended period of economic crisis gripped Cuba due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country’s main trading partner. Cuba lost its primary supplier of imported oil, food, machinery, and other goods. To make matters worse, the U.S. escalated its economic war on Cuba, tightening the embargo (in place since 1958) by extending trade prohibitions and penalties to foreign companies and foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies.

What came to be known as Cuba’s “Special Period,” offers a dramatic and inspirational example of local, regional, and national culture shift. Cuba parlayed the crisis into a transition to regenerative agriculture, and a diversifying of educational, housing, and economic opportunities. The rapid transition away from fossil fuels is a strikingly beautiful example of not only the resilience of people, but what is possible when a state government and the people come together with the unified goal of survival and resistance. It’s clear that they didn’t initially do it it voluntarily, but as this film highlights, the benefits to quality of life became clear over time.

This history of the Special Period goes a long way in showing not just how Cuba has survived this long, but why it will be able to resist the escalation of U.S. aggression for a much longer time than would have otherwise been possible.

I often wonder what Cuba would be like today if, instead of so vehemently opposing it, the U.S. had actually been interested in peaceful, mutually beneficial relations with its neighbor. For that matter, what would Venezuela be like? Or Iran without regional Israeli and global U.S. hegemonic fantasies?

Hegemony and the Final Dead End

The whole world faces a challenge not so dissimilar to Cuba’s. The big difference lies in the choice we have—the choice to turn away from the fossil fuel path of violence, injustice, and environmental destruction or not. It is a choice between that which is life-affirming and that which is not; ultimately, simply a choice between life and death.

Fossil fuel addiction and the globalized capitalism of today link directly to hegemony through the goal of ultimate control of oil (and other limited resources). Cuba’s transition was initiated by a dramatically changed context. That is what is needed on the global scale too. One essential and strategic way to frame that change of context as relates to the U.S., is as a shift away from hegemony to cooperation and mutuality; a shift toward the realization of our long-professed values of liberty and justice for all. As long as hegemony is the driving force of the most powerful country in the world there is no hope. Every empire falls, and it’s a long way down.