The Progressive International calls for 2 December to become a Global Day of Anti-Imperialist Action — uniting workers and the oppressed everywhere to dismantle the US war machine.
2 December is a symbolic date. On this day 200 hundred years ago, US President James Monroe set out a doctrine of domination in the Western Hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine was deployed to keep the US’ southern neighbours divided and subservient to Washington’s interests. It would mark a critical point of departure for the US imperial project. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt reinterpreted and radicalised the Doctrine, believing that it conferred an “international police power” on “civilised society” in the region.
Five years later, US warships sailed south to occupy Nicaragua and overthrow the nation’s President, whose sovereigntist agenda threatened the interests of US capital. US Major Smedley D. Butler was a member of the occupying force. He later confessed he spent “most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
Both Roosevelt’s doctrine of US “police power” and Butler’s confession echo through each of the 469 military interventions the US has launched since 1798. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation,” Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, explained in a formulation eerily reminiscent of Roosevelt’s words a century earlier.
When the fall of the Soviet Union removed an important constraint on US power, that use of force escalated radically. Over 80% of US interventions launched since 1946 took place in the post-Soviet era. As documented by The Intercept, the “indispensable nation” launched 23 covert interventions across Africa, West Asia, and the Pacific between 2017 and 2020 alone.
Today, the Monroe Doctrine is global, with US capital reaching ever deeper into our lives and our societies.
This global influence is backstopped by the largest military in history. The US operates some 750 overseas bases in 80 countries, has a total of 173,000 troops in 159 countries around the world, and commands a war budget of nearly $1 trillion, or 40% of total global military spending. The sprawling infrastructure of the US empire has made it, in the words of President Jimmy Carter, "the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”
Now, that ‘warlike’ contagion is spreading. Through mechanisms like the Global Fragility Act, the US increasingly relies on proxies to implement its imperial policies.
200 years after the foundation of the Monroe Doctrine, the peoples of the world have had enough of US imperialism and its disastrous costs for human life and habitat. They built the war machine. Together, we will dismantle it.
Join the campaign here.
In solidarity,
The Progressive International Secretariat
Additional Notes
1.Though that U.S. military expendture constituted nearly 40 percent of the total military spending worldwide, even this amount is presently pregarded as a highly under estimated figure, (qmonthlyreview, 01/11/2023); the war machine of the United States could be a well US$1.537 trillion!
2.The Global Fragility Act (GFA) was passed by Congress as part of the 2020 Consolidated Appropriations Act (see section on GFA here) and signed into law by President Trump on December 20, 2019.
In April 2022, President Biden announced the priority contexts for implementation: Haiti, Libya, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, and Coastal West Africa (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, and Togo).
3. The United States boasts having the world's highest national debt with a debt-to GDP ratio of approximately 128.13%. The USG's spending exceeds its income without a budget surplus since 2001.
