Socialist Strategy in an Age of War and Empire
October 13, 2026
THAT WE LIVE in a fundamentally dangerous world is no revelation. Climate change, war, dispossession, and hunger haunt our societies. But the current moment is uniquely dangerous due to the rise of authoritarian regimes that are pushing confrontation on the world stage. The genocide in Gaza and the US war on Iran are among the most glaring examples of imperial war machines wreaking destruction.
Some political commentators—from mainstream to alternative media spaces—have interpreted recent months as signaling a crisis of US hegemony.1Michael Hirsch, “How the Iran War Reshaped the Global Landscape of Power,” Foreign Policy, June 18, 2026; Azadeh Moaveni, “How Tehran Won the World,” New York Times, June 16, 2026; Mona Ali, “The Reckoning,” Equator, April 6, 2026; David McNally, “US Imperialism: Projecting Strength to Cover Up Weakness,” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, April 13, 2026. However, the nature and import of that crisis remain unclear given the divergent attitudes toward and understandings of US empire. And these are critical to strategic direction for the Left.
A singular fact remains unambiguous: the Trump administration’s foreign policy constitutes an apparent break with the United States’s post-Bretton Woods support for a multilateral “rules-based order.” The MAGA right has attempted to leverage the United States’s military predominance to reassert US hegemony in light of its apparent decline relative to its closest rival, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In addition to its continued support for Israel’s genocidal attempt to remake the regional order in the Middle East (in continuity with Biden’s policy) and Trump’s efforts to reconfigure terms of trade to the United States’s advantage through tariffs, the Trump administration has launched on a series of escalating military adventures.
Imperial Adventures
In January, the United States invaded Venezuela, kidnapping its president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and installing Delcy Rodriguez as the new president.2Maga Miranda, “The US Kidnapping of Nicholás Maduro: Interview with Geo Maher,” Spectre, January 27, 2026, doi.org/10.63478/90LWLIK6; Shireen Akram-Boshar and Charlie Post, “On US Intervention and the Venezuelan State: Interview with Federico Fuentes,” Spectre, July 14, 2026, com/on-us-intervention-and-the-venezuelan-state/. In late February, Washington, in conjunction with Israel, launched a series of air strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the ostensible goal of catalyzing a similar regime change. Iran’s entirely predictable shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz—and its relative success in withstanding US bombardment, notwithstanding enormous human suffering—have severely dampened the global economy, stymying the United States’s regional ambitions. Despite this humiliating stalemate, key figures within the Trump administration continue to plan further adventures in Cuba, itself ravaged by an inhumane US blockade.
What all this means for the global left is wildly unclear. Certainly Iran’s control over Hormuz—like the PRC’s use of its dominant position in the rare earth minerals market—have checked US imperial ambitions. But whether this geopolitical moment is more or less hospitable to left forces within and outside the Middle East remains a question. On the one hand, Trump’s destabilizing use of military power and economic protectionism seem to suggest autonomy from an integrated global economy. Yet, this autonomy is belied by its vulnerability to its rivals’ control over important economic chokepoints, both logistical (as in Hormuz) and within the global supply chain for goods (as with China’s control over rare earth minerals).
Some left commentators have theorized this Trumpian permutation of imperialism as a strategy for countering imperial decline. They see a decline in the preeminent position of US capital leading to increasing use of the state to secure America’s slice of the world’s economic pie. Such a view ties the destruction abroad to the United States’s increasing authoritarianism at home.3William I. Robinson, “Behind Trump’s Tariff’s Is Capital’s Warfare Against the Working Class,” Truthout, February 17, 2025. While several commentators have done much to complicate this picture, it’s crucial to note that the pull towards increased authoritarian, state repression, and nationalist foreign policy is not unique to the United States, nor to Trumpism; the global economic slump and increased pressures of the world market have led countries around the world to adopt similar solutions.4For an analysis of the conflicts between the more technocratic and populist wings of the MAGA coalition, see Gillian Hart, “Trump’s Tariffs and US Imperialism,” Africa Is a Country, May 12, 2025. Reaction and imperialist pressure have become the order of the day in a global order ravaged by decades of austerity.
Disaggregating Imperialism
Unfortunately, there is little consensus on the left today about how to understand contemporary imperialism. While we hope this issue’s roundtable on Imperialism Today will begin to clarify this crucial question, let’s identify the outlines of historical and current debates. Many Marxist debates about imperialism revolve around two axes: the extent of political military and economic conflict in the world system today; and the basis of the continued division of the world into dominant and subordinate economies and polities—that is, the gap between the Global North and South.5See Charles Post, “Explaining Imperialism Today: An Alternative Analysis” Spectre 9 (Fall 2023) for a more in-depth review of three recent contributions to the debate.
There is little consensus on the Left today about how to understand contemporary imperialism.
The relationship between political military competition among states and the global competition among capitals has been at the heart of debates about imperialism since the early twentieth century. Early formulations, often based on notions of a “fusion” between capital and the state, simply equated capitalist competition with attempts to divide the world into colonies and “spheres of influence.”6Aspects of such an analysis are found in V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) and Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy (1915), both widely available online. The decolonization of most of the world after the Second World War raised major challenges for this equation. However, the absence of adequate analysis has led important theorists of imperialism to argue that imperialism has two “relatively autonomous” dynamics that do not necessarily coincide.7The foremost exponent of this view is David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The contemporary intensification of both political–military and economic competition make clarifying their interrelationship particularly pressing.
One possible line of research is how foreign investment and trade operate as countertendencies to the tendency for profit rates to fall. Among the countertendencies to falling profitability discussed in the third volume of Marx’s Capital is the higher-than-average profits accrued from foreign investment, especially in what we today call the Global South. Political–military competition can then be seen as arising from efforts of multiple capitalist states to open different parts of the Global South to their “own” capitals’ trade and investment. It seems clear that such economic and political military competition intensify during low growth periods in the world economy, such as we have been living through since 2008. While periods of robust profitability and growth allow competing capitals a healthy environment for investment, these opportunities shrink during global slumps and profitable investment often comes at the cost of other capitals and their national capitalist states.
Related to this, is a sharp debate on the global left on the contours of inter-imperialist competition and rivalry today. Some have argued for an unchallenged US imperial hegemony, claiming that even today the United States faces no serious competition from China or other state.8See, for example, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso Books, 2013). Related to this is the claim that global economic and military–political conflict no longer takes the form of inter-imperialist rivalry, but of a contest between the United States and “socialist” or “anti-imperialist” powers like China. This analysis often underpins a state-centric anti-imperialism, which views the task of the global left as aligning with such “anti-imperialist” state powers (and genuinely ignoring the relations of oppression they contain). Offering a counter-perspective are those who see in the US–China rivalry a new inter-imperialist contest for global hegemony. Although they may differ on the details of the origins and character of this rivalry, those who make this argument are generally united in promoting an “internationalism from below” independent of both imperialist camps.
Finally, there is the debate on the roots of the global division between imperialist and subordinate states and economies. The most influential theories—which focus on factors such as “super-exploitation,” “unequal exchange,” and “monopoly”—make the transfer of surplus value from the periphery to the core the central mechanism reproducing global inequality.9See John Charles Smith, Imperialism in the Twentieth Century: Globalization, Imperialism, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016). This analysis risks imagining the world today as fundamentally defined by national conflicts—as opposed to class antagonisms shaped within an imperial order. Such perspectives tend to bolster those who look to the new and insurgent regimes in the Global South as a “progressive” alternative to US and western Imperialism. More compelling is the view that the profit-driven process of real competition among capitals, based on the exploitation of all global workers, underpins global uneven and combined development.10See Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially Part 2. This war among capitalists, fought with “the heavy artillery of fixed capital,” both explains the continued subordination of capitalists in the Global South to their class brethren in the Global North and the sharpening exploitation experienced by workers in both zones of the world economy.
Authentic Anti-Imperialism Today
All these questions move us to dilemmas of left strategy. Here, one urgent need on the Left, at a time of glaring weakness in antiwar organizing, is to recuperate some of the best socialist perspectives on resisting imperialism and war. Note, however, that Liebknecht says the main enemy is at home. He readily understood that there were other enemies and would never have supported the Czar of Russia or the British Empire as preferable to Germany. Liebknecht’s principle was that true anti-imperialism begins with opposition to one’s one state and its imperial ambitions.11Karl Liebknecht, “The Main Enemy is at Home!” in Karl Liebknecht, Ausgewälte Reden und Aufsätze [Selected Speeches and Essays] (Berlin 1952 [1915]), 296–301, available at marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1915/05/main-enemy-home.htm.
One urgent need on the Left is to recuperate some of the best socialist perspectives.
In the case of colonial powers, however, there is an important new wrinkle. One can—and should—support the military struggle of a colonial power or a subordinate state in the world system against a major imperial power. Socialists hope that giving the latter a bloody nose will constrain their warmongering and weaken empire. This involves the principle of military support for a subordinate power against imperialism.12It should always be remembered that a globally subordinate state might also engage in regional aggression. But this does not require—and should not entail—political support for the government resisting military aggression. There is a world of difference between supporting the military defense of Iran in its conflict with the United States and politically defending its authoritarian regime, which violently represses women, trade unionists, queers, Kurds, and other minorities. Any such political support betrays socialist solidarity with the oppressed. As Hal Draper once wrote, “A distinctive feature of the Marxist approach is the distinction between military support of a given armed struggle and political support to a given political organization (including a government) which may be officially ‘in charge’ of that armed struggle.”13Hal Draper, “The ABC of National Liberation Movements” (1969), available at marxists.org/archive/draper/1969/abc/abc.htm#CHAPTER4.
In the mid-1930s, for instance, the great Caribbean Marxists C. L. R. James and George Padmore galvanized a movement against Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. They argued that the Left should support the military defense of Ethiopia against Italian colonizers. Despite this opposition to Italian imperialism, it would never have occurred to James and Padmore to politically support the Ethiopian monarchy of Hailie Selassie. Instead, they proclaimed their solidarity with the workers and peasants of that African state, not its local oppressor. Sadly, sections of today’s global left fail to uphold this vital distinction.
United Fronts against War and Empire
Another key Marxist principle is the commitment to building united fronts against imperialism and war. In order to generate a robust antiwar movement, Marxists have an obligation to reach out to all left-leaning forces—from pacifists to social democrats—in a genuine effort to build a united movement against military intervention. This means creating truly democratic coalitions in which activists from a variety of left currents and traditions have a voice and a vote. Whatever its failings, the US campaign against the war in Vietnam (1964–1975) was strengthened by the collaboration between Christian pacifists, social democrats, and revolutionary socialists in a movement that brought millions into action against the war.14For an insider’s account, see Fred Halstead, Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War,2nd (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991). After the global rebellions of 1968—from Vietnam to France and from Mexico to the United States—the group that had largely initiated the American antiwar movement, the Socialist Workers Party of the US, failed to keep pace with the radicalization of the movement, leading it to play a conservatizing role. Its strategic outlook was static, and it squandered much of its political authority. But its early work in building the movement was laudable. Today, precious little of this approach remains, as small left groups try to “corner the market” via front group operations that they control and micromanage. Yet, the lack of mass democratic organizing via united fronts has prevented building the dynamic and growing antiwar movement we desperately need.
The lack of mass democratic organizing via united fronts has prevented building the dynamic and growing antiwar movement we desperately need.
How did we get to this point? How did the “main enemy is at home” become a blinkered rejection of solidarity with those abroad? How did the crucial distinction between military and political support cease to survive as a live mode of analysis, or even to register as a theme? How did the general outlook of the broad left, and its largest organizations, lose the old commonsense orientation of organizing a united front against war?
Building in a Time of Left Disarray
We offer no simplistic solutions here, or in the pages to come. There are obvious contributing factors: the United States remains both the world’s largest economy and the most vicious imperial force on the world stage. It seems, since Vietnam, that no resistance has achieved meaningful change in imperial politics. Organizing remains difficult, neoliberalism has atomized huge segments of society, while the instability and loss of so many left organizations have left many of those ready to radicalize deeply depoliticized. This accounts for the tendency to hanker for nation-states that can be dressed up as “anti-imperialist.”
A new direction for the Left in the United States must engage with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest progressive organization in the United States. The DSA has many sharp and dedicated members, locals, and caucuses, but remains largely focused on domestic politics, while its International Committee has tended toward a state-centric approach to resisting imperialism.15For some examples of those within the DSA trying to strategically integrate the organization’s overarching emphasis on electoralism with attempts to build working-class power, see Promise Li, “LA’s Left–Liberal Electoral Problem: Reflections on LA’s Mayoral Race and Beyond,” Spectre, July 7, 2026, doi.org/10.63478.K6KA9COB; and Ben Rosenfield and Holden Taylor, “Municipal Socialism’s ‘YIMBY’ Problem: The Housing Crisis and Zohran—Which Way Forward?” Spectre, February 10, 2026, doi.org/10.63478/SHTMZMYB. Funneling energy into electoral gains for Democrats both narrows their focus and binds any electoral successes to the party which, from Vietnam to Gaza, has been most responsible for US imperialism.16On the narrowed focus of electoral politics, see David McNally and Charles Post, “Beyond Electoralism: Mass Action and the Remaking of the Working Class,” Spectre, no 3, (2021): doi.org/10.63478/KGDTNGCS; Kim Moody, Breaking the Impasse: Electoral Politics, Mass Action, and the New Socialist Movement in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket, 2022). It is no surprise that the organization has largely failed to support or initiate broad social movements for peace.17For a discussion of the vexed relationship between DSA and internationalism, see Andy Sernatiger, “Review: Debates in the DSA,” New Politics, August 2, 2026. Smaller and more radical political organizations outside the DSA also too often undercut international solidarity by supporting nation states instead of the proletariat these states also oppress. Compounding matters, many left formations have generally adopted stances of, at best, quiet toleration and at worst, active competition toward each other. In this fragmented left ecosystem, theoretical and historical grievances undercut the solidarity that would be achieved by jointly agitation against US empire before it even gets off the ground.
The lack of continuity between generations of activists on the Left has led to the loss of the strategic insights won through active struggle in earlier mass movements, which are rarely part of the political education provided to newly radicalizing comrades. The conditions for the reproduction of historical memory and organizational capacity are in decline if not free-fall. As the radical and often international force of BLM and the international women’s strike movements receded into memory without leaving organizational forms in their wake, it was the Gaza Solidarity movement that held the greatest promise. But here again, the lack of a genuine united front approach has led to a deeply fragmented terrain of left activism. Now we have an imperial war against Iran with little semblance of a real antiwar movement.
None of this need be permanent. The crises of our world continue to push people—young working-class people especially—toward socialist alternatives. A recent national poll found that 80 percent of young people in the US (between 18 and 34 years of age) have a negative view of the US economy and that nearly half view democratic socialism positively.18“New CNBC Generation Lab Poll Shows Almost Half of 18- to 34-year-olds View Democratic Socialism Positively,” CNBC, August 13, 2026. But reaching them, drawing them into action, training thousands as organizers, providing spaces for democratic decision-making and deep political education will not happen automatically. It will require a renewed orientation to unity in struggle joined to ongoing political discussion and clarification. It is a large task. The situation demands nothing less. ×