The New Imperialism
Russia and its proxies are on an unchecked rampage
(Flats bombed by Russia yesterday in Ternopil, Ukraine [Thomas Peters/Reuters])
The new imperialism has many faces. It operates on countless levels. But it has only one goal – to use and legitimize aggression to change borders by force.
‘Whataboutists’ will argue, with Moscow’s blessing, that the US has been the world’s leading postwar imperialist. If so, is the US still invading Iraq? Does the US have any troops left there apart from a small 2,000-member-or-so contingent with an anti-ISIS mission and Iraqi government support? Does the US today occupy states against their will? Has the US changed postwar borders by force?
To see the new imperialism for what it is, we must see past reams of virulent propaganda. Even so, until recently some credibly attributed imperial ambitions, especially in the Middle East, to France and the UK. This interwar agenda continued up to, even beyond, the 1956 Suez crisis. French withdrawal from Indochina and loss of Algeria, as well as British withdrawal from east of Suez after 1968 and the more recent end of France’s military missions in West Africa, have effectively cleared the imperial docket of European democracies, which none has had for decades.
All of this makes Russia’s naked post-1991 aggression so exceptional, objectionable and reprehensible. After two wars and brutal, continuous repression of Chechnya, invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, use of mercenaries and coups d’état across Africa, long-term sponsorship of dictators from Belarus and Serbia to Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, Russia is today’s imperial power par excellence.
It aims to destroy Ukraine as an independent state and to install and maintain autocrats in power. To achieve this, Russian imperialism operates on three levels:
First, it uses military force to occupy and hold new territory, mainly in Ukraine, while launching campaigns of misdirection, sabotage and terrorism to ensure allies do not intervene decisively on Ukraine’s side. Russia’s 2022 invasion, preceded by a smaller operation in 2014, has been Moscow’s largest military operation since 1945 by far. To conquer Ukraine, Russia has sacrificed the lives and limbs of over a million soldiers for tiny gains in Donbas. Russia rains hellfire down on Ukrainian civilians every night to undermine morale, while hitting power systems to keep Ukrainians cold and dark. Russia blows up railways in Poland, targets supermarkets in Germany and launches drones over Danish and Dutch airports to keep European allies from sending more air defences or other military capabilities to defeat Russia in Ukraine. Russia also enlists other authoritarian states as military-industrial enablers. Iran and North Korea have been full-fledged war-fighting auxiliaries from the start, sending drones and even formed infantry units. China is now openly providing military support.
Second, Russia creates a climate of fear and discouragement in every allied jurisdiction. They pump extremist bilge and weaponized skepticism onto every platform — from Facebook to TikTok — to ensure no serious political debate focuses on the threat they represent. When journalists or politicians call Russia out, Moscow’s influence operations target and undermine them.
Third, Russia ruthlessly exploits carefully-cultivated proxies in business, civil society, government, media, politics and universities to reinforce this agenda. There are innumerable examples across Euro-Atlantic space. The most obvious, salacious and damaging one today is Trump’s White House, which is now again promoting a ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine which is in fact a blueprint for continuing Russian imperialism. Their one-sided, made-in-Moscow scheme, if implemented, would amount to a unilateral capitulation and surrender of Ukraine’s sovereignty, as Ukrainian officials have already noted. It is being presented now, via Trump, because Moscow hopes Zelenskyy has been weakened by a recent corruption scandal. With US help, Moscow seeks to require Ukraine to withdraw from parts of Donbas it still holds. Moscow’s plan would halve the size of Ukraine’s army and disallow the presence of foreign troops in Ukraine. Far from seeing Ukraine join NATO, as Ukrainians still hope to do, this perverse proposal would prohibit Ukraine from securing effective security guarantees. It is simply a prelude to more and larger-scale war.
Far from seeing any problem with this advocacy of Russian fascist imperialism, today’s White House sees playing Moscow’s stooge as a stepping stone on the path towards a new alliance with Russia. It would be difficult to imagine a more dishonourable goal for US policy. Such a result would be far worse than a ‘new Yalta’ since it is being proposed by Washington at a time when — very unlike 1945 — allies have it fully within their power to defeat Russian aggression in Ukraine.
The new imperialism seeks to conquer while dispossessing democracies of their deliberative faculties and their will to act. Russia’s aggressive new push to subjugate peoples and dominate the global debate has no postwar analogies outside Communist China, which also seeks to obliterate neighbouring ethnographic-cultural groups from Tibetans and Mongols to Uighurs and Hui — just as Russia seeks to erase Ukrainian statehood, nationality, language, identity, culture and agency.
In the absence of effective collective self-defence, the new imperialism is impoverishing democratic debate and destabilizing the world. Left unchecked, it will devour new territories and change more borders by force, while narrowing the circle left to free institutions and the rule of law. It has already undermined our prosperity; without action, a wider crisis is likely. Today’s Russian-led imperialism is a brutal new form of tyranny, which we have no choice but to confront and defeat.