American imperialism is not a recent development, and neither are American military interventions in pursuit of imperialist goals. But the kind of surplus imperialism to which the US is now committed, accounting for nearly 40 percent of global military spending on its own, is new. It dates roughly from the end of the cold war, and it has produced a doctrine under which the US can take military action anywhere in the world whenever it wants, with no explanation required. The tradition of “just war,” which previously dominated political rhetoric about military action, was flexible to the point of near incoherence, but at the very least it demanded that war be declared with a specific goal in mind, that it be declared by an appropriate authority, and that the destruction inflicted be proportionate to the aims one hoped to achieve. All of that went out the door with George W. Bush and the global war on terror. The country’s new rationale for military action became a part of American law when Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in September 2001. As Wood puts it, “military action now requires no specific aim at all.”
It may be, however, that the goals of American war-making haven’t disappeared so much as they have been generalized to such an extent that they are now hard to make out at all. The end of the cold war also produced Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, in which the political theorist argued that the spread of liberal market democracies and the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled “the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This is probably the most controversial claim made by a political theorist over the past thirty years, and Fukuyama himself has since amended it with so many qualifications and caveats that he may as well have repudiated it entirely. But imagine the “end of history” thesis not so much as a description of the world but as a goal of US foreign policy — something to be achieved, preferably through the movements of global capital, but also by force wherever necessary. As the region on which the capitalist world most depends for its oil supplies, the Middle East can do more to disrupt the smooth functioning of America’s global dominance than anywhere else on the planet — it is the place where history most threatens to break out. And so the United States has gone there, again and again, to stop history in its tracks, to demonstrate, in the paraphrased words of Mark Fisher, that there is no alternative.
The United States has been trying to keep Iran frozen in place for almost seventy-five years, whether by helping to depose Mossadegh, subsidizing the shah even as he lost any semblance of domestic political support, prolonging the Iran-Iraq War by playing each side off the other, or foreclosing real opportunities for diplomatic engagement with the axis of evil speech and the militarization of the Middle East in general. Over the past two decades, the US has worked diligently to maintain its stranglehold on Iranian politics and society, and not just in material terms. American politicians and media personalities have effectively banned any discussion of Iran that tries to move beyond the war on terror binary. To hear Americans tell it, Iranians either support freedom on American terms or favor the tyranny of an Islamic dictatorship. They want nuclear weapons because their leaders want to blow up American cities and wipe Israel off the face of the earth. (If they want nuclear weapons and not just nuclear power, which remains a matter of debate, it is certainly not to embark on a suicidal global offensive.) Homegrown civil rights protests, like the Green movement that convulsed Iran after the disputed results of Ahmadinejad’s reelection in 2009, are described as attempts to overthrow the regime. But the Green movement was nothing of the kind. It was a nonviolent reform project seeking the expansion of Iranian civil rights. Its leaders no more wanted the revolutionary government abolished than Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to abolish Congress and the presidency.
