this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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I disagree with the notion that dominant organizations would never give significant of money away in a manner contrary to their material interests. If anything, the opposite is true: if you are dominant, then you have more freedom to get away with acting against your material interests (intentionally or not).
I think that our treatment of Israel is an example of this. All of the money we have been throwing at them does not buy anything at all, since the Israeli government does not even seem to be that grateful for it but just expects it as a matter of course. They seem hell-bent on bringing the entire region into a war that would pull us in and cause a ton of damage to our material interests, and we have barely any ability to stop them from doing this. Worst, this situation is entirely avoidable because we could, at the very least, put strings on our military aid and then enforce them, rather than just giving Israel whatever it wants and ignoring whenever it crosses any of our supposed lines.
Just to be clear, I am not arguing that our material interests are the only reason to care about what is happening or to criticize our government's actions, I am just saying that it makes no sense to just take as given that a dominant organization will always act in its own best material interests in this way.
Undermining of independent states in the middle east is in the material interest of the US empire. They just disagree internally about how to best go about doing this. A regional war is not directly against US ruling interests unless they think they would lose that fight or if it would shut down the Strait of Hormuz for a long time. The US has not exactly reined in its Israeli attack dog in any meaningful way, which us what they could do and would do if they wanted descalation.
It's not in the interests of the wider civilian population of the planet, or even just those in the US, but those things barely register for empire.
The problem with this reasoning is that instability, whether as the result of undermining governments or regional wars, has unpredictable outcomes. For example, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran seemed like a great idea to those in power in the U.S. at the time when we disagreed with Iran's policies, but this decision turned around to bite us when that got overturned. So it is not in our material interests to promote instability, and I think that the current administration knows this, so to the extent it is supporting Israel with effectively no conditions on its actions I think that it is behaving irrationally rather than maliciously.
The US Empire barely cares about blowback, they subscribe for a maximalist foreign policy pressure ethos. Like in Domino Theory, they abhor independence lest it coherently spread, and act swiftly and decisively against it like playing whack-a-mole. The ethos doesn't have to deliver perfect results free of blowback, it just needs to be good enough for the interests it serves. Regarsing Iran, this is why it is co stantly threatened and sanctiobed by the US and its cronies. The blowback was too successful so they are still just doing a maximum pressure campaign and constantly threatening war. They take a similar approach against Syria and Yemen. They took a similar approach against Iraq and likely will again.
When speaking of material interest and the US state, using "our" can be ambiguous. I am not of the ruling class of the US, and certainly nowhere near the great financiers and imperialists whose interests are the real ones served by empire. So I would never say this serves "our" interests using this kind of logic. Are you of that class? Often actions are taken against the interests of the non-ruling classes and in favor of the ruling class.
One can make an argument that the citizen US working class is a beneficiary of imperialism, paying far below what they should for imports and having wages propped up by the petrodollar, buy this is challenging to rationalize with the idea that it is simply in their interest to, say, keep Iran subservient to US empire. The public are ignorant to these things and there is no mechanistic connection between their actions and these outcomes except the propaganda appaeatus that manufactures their consent, which is really a top-down monopoly on information that still does not inform them of how this might be in their interest. And even then, it is arguable whether this is more generally in their interest. Undermining the petrodollar might lead to their yolk being removed.
When hasn't the US used the british strategy of balkanization, especially in the middle east? Divide and conquer a cornerstone of their strategy, in the ME, africa, south america, SE asia... literally everywhere.
Mossadegh's government was actively overthrown by the CIA, then the US supported the Shah and his son, and had strong relations with imperial Iran until they were overthrown in the Iranian revolution. The Iranian people refused to accept that right-wing US-puppet and his brutal regime any longer, and there was nothing the US could do about it.
US leaders repeatedly tell you why supporting Israel is in the US's interests: its a giant unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle east to project power on this resource rich region. The US would never support even another colonialist project with the same values, unless it was in its material interests.