Imperialist Wars—And What Could Be Done About Them

Imperialist Wars—And What Could Be Done About Them

by | Dec 10, 2022 | Peace & Disarmament

Although all wars are not imperialist wars, it is remarkable how many imperial conquests have occurred over past centuries.

Mobilizing their military forces, powerful states and, later, nations carved out vast empires at the expense of weaker or less warlike societies.  Some of the largest and best-known empires to emerge over the millennia were the Persian, the Chinese, the Mongol, the Ottoman, the Russian, the Spanish, and the British.

The standard policy for these and other empires was to absorb new, conquered lands into their domains, either as parts of the mother country or as colonies.  In the eighteenth century, the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires used their military muscle to seize substantial portions of the Western Hemisphere from the native inhabitants.  During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imperial conquest accelerated rapidly around the world.  By 1913 almost all of Africa had been colonized by European powers, while Imperial Russia, having annexed its neighbors, had become the world’s largest nation.  Asia, too, had fallen largely under foreign domination.  Meanwhile, the United States, established by a thin string of colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America, expanded across the continent to the Pacific, mostly thanks to successful wars against Mexico and Indian nations.  Thereafter it moved on to colonize Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

Rising Resistance to Imperialist Wars

But imperialist conquests didn’t sit well with the emerging democratic spirit of the early twentieth century.  They didn’t sit well with the rising socialist movement that denounced imperialism as a tool of the ruling class.  They didn’t sit well with subject nationality groups and nations that were beginning to demand national self-determination and independence.

Consequently, as the horrors of World War I engulfed large portions of the globe and as war-weary soldiers and the public turned increasingly against imperialist war aims, government leaders adapted to the new mood.  Having, belatedly, brought the United States into an alliance with Britain and France in their war against the Central Powers, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson issued his Fourteen Points in January 1918.  This document promised no secret imperialist treaties, an adjustment of colonial claims, and a League of Nations to guarantee “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small States alike.”  The Fourteen Points evoked an enthusiastic response, including from the young Ho Chi Minh, who turned up at the 1919 Versailles peace conference to press for Vietnam’s independence from French colonial rule.

In many ways, the Versailles peace settlement proved a failure.  The promised “self-determination” was limited to Europe, and although the League did establish a “mandate” system to prepare colonies elsewhere for independence, it merely shifted their rulers from the Central Powers to the war’s victors.  Moreover, the rising fascist nations—Germany, Italy, and Japan—threw off even a pretense of favoring decolonization and launched imperialist wars in Africa, Europe, and Asia.

Important Breakthroughs and Setbacks After World War II

Ultimately, it took World War II to shatter the old colonial system.  In its aftermath, the imperial powers gradually abandoned their colonial rule in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.  In some cases (for example, in Indonesia, Algeria, and Vietnam), they were driven out by anti-colonial revolutions.  More often, however, internal agitation for independence and external pressure by the United Nations led to the advent of self-government, after 1945, in most of the former 80 colonies.

Even so, as the old-style imperialism crumbled, a newer model—replacing outright colonialism with political control through occasional military intervention—arose during the Cold War.  For the most part, this new imperialism was practiced by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan and by the United States in Latin America, and Vietnam.  With the end of the Cold War, however, even the new imperialism declined.

Therefore, it came as a shock when, this February, the Russian government, having formally recognized Ukraine’s independence in 1994, launched an old-fashioned imperialist war against that nation.  Only a few days before the invasion, Vladimir Putin issued a proclamation denying Ukraine’s right to an independent existence and claiming that Ukraine was “Russian land.”  Not surprisingly, the UN General Assembly condemned the invasion by a vote of 141 to 5.

Although Putin justified the military assault by claiming that Ukraine’s membership in NATO would provide an existential threat to Russia, that membership was not at all imminent when the invasion occurred.  A month later, when President Zelensky offered to have his nation remain neutral in exchange for a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine, Putin ignored the offer.  In May, when Finland and Sweden, horrified by the Russian invasion, announced plans to join NATO, Putin failed to halt it.  Instead, this October, Russia annexed about a sixth of Ukraine’s territory.  Nor has Putin ever renounced gobbling up the rest of Ukraine.

Stopping Imperialist Aggression

Can anything be done to bring an end to imperialist wars?

Yes, several things could be done.  One that has been effective on some occasions is to mobilize an anti-imperialist movement in the aggressor nation and elsewhere.  Another that has worked is for the colonized to militarily resist the imperialist power―although, of course, the human cost can be enormous.  Furthermore, the international community can roundly condemn imperialist wars and refuse to recognize territorial annexations that flow from them.

Ultimately, though, the world needs a strengthened international security system that will reject both the old and the new imperialism.  In some ways, the United Nations already provides this framework through the UN Charter, the power to levy economic sanctions, and a structure for the mediation of conflicts.  Even so, the world organization is not yet strong enough to wipe out the vestiges of imperialist aggression.  No single country―and certainly not the imperial nations of the past―has the credibility and power to tackle this project alone.  But the world community might just possess enough wisdom and determination to finish the job it began a century ago.

China, Russia, And The Bomb

China, Russia, And The Bomb

by | Nov 28, 2022 | Peace & Disarmament

Even international alliances can unravel when nations confront the insanity of a nuclear holocaust.

An illustration of this point occurred recently, after Vladimir Putin once again threatened Ukraine and other nations with nuclear war.  “To defend Russia and our people, we doubtlessly will use all weapons resources at our disposal,” the Russian president said.  “This is not a bluff.”  In response to this statement and to sharp UN condemnation of Russian nuclear threats, Chinese president Xi Jinping issued a public statement early this November, assailing “the use of, or threats to use nuclear weapons.”  To “prevent a nuclear crisis” in Europe or Asia, he insisted, the world should “advocate that nuclear weapons cannot be used” and “a nuclear war cannot be waged.”

Aren’t these two nuclear-armed nations currently aligned in their resistance to U.S. foreign policy?  Yes, they are, and when it came to Putin’s war upon Ukraine, Xi refrained from suggesting a Russian withdrawal.  But nuclear war, as the Chinese leader made clear, was simply not acceptable.

This was not the first time a Russian-Chinese alliance was ruffled by a dispute over the use of nuclear weapons.  An even deeper conflict occurred during the late 1950s and early 1960s when, ironically, the roles of the two nations were exactly the reverse.

At that time, the Chinese government, led by Mao Zedong, was embarked on a crash program to develop nuclear weapons.  In October 1957, China’s weapons program secured a major gain when the Russian and Chinese governments signed the New Defense Technical Accord, in which the Russians agreed to supplementing the nuclear assistance they had already provided to the Chinese by supplying them with a prototype atomic bomb, missiles, and useful technical data.

But Russian officials soon had reason to doubt the wisdom of assisting China’s nuclear weapons development program.  As Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev recalled, the following month, at a Moscow conclave of Communist party leaders from around the world, Mao gave a speech on nuclear war that startled those in attendance.  According to the Soviet leader, the “gist” of Mao’s speech was:  “We shouldn’t fear war.  We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic bombs and missiles.  No matter what kind of war breaks out―conventional or thermonuclear―we’ll win.”  When it came to China, Mao reportedly said, “we may lose more than three hundred million people.  So what?  War is war.  The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.”

Khrushchev found Mao’s remarks “deeply disturbing,” and recalled with irritation:  “Everybody except Mao was thinking about how to avoid war.  Our principal slogan was ‘On with the Struggle for Peace and Peaceful Coexistence.’ Yet here came Mao . . . saying we shouldn’t be afraid of war.’  In early 1958, as Soviet doubts increased about the reliability of China’s leadership in dealing with nuclear weapons, Khrushchev decided to postpone shipment of the prototype atomic bomb to China.

Eventually, the Soviet government not only withdrew its assistance to the Chinese nuclear weapons program in 1960, but took steps that placed the Soviet Union at loggerheads with the Chinese leadership.  Key among these steps was working out an agreement on a nuclear test ban treaty with the governments of the United States and Britain—an agreement that, in part, was designed to block the ability of China to become a nuclear power.  This Soviet shift toward a nuclear arms control and disarmament treaty with the West was bitterly opposed by China’s rulers, who were determined to develop nuclear weapons and, by 1964, succeeded in doing so.  Meanwhile, the Sino-Soviet rift grew ever more heated, with the Chinese pulling out of the Soviet-dominated World Peace Council and ferociously competing with the Russians for leadership of the world Communist movement.

There are some lessons that can be learned from these incidents, in which major powers displayed signs of veering toward nuclear war.  The obvious one is that even military allies might balk, at times, when they see an international confrontation slipping toward a nuclear disaster.  Another, less evident, is that nations with access to nuclear weapons are not necessarily restrained from threatening or waging nuclear war by the prospect of nuclear retaliation from other nuclear powers.  Or, to put it another way, nuclear deterrence is unreliable.  Above all, these events and others underscore the fact that, while nuclear weapons exist, the world remains in peril.

Fortunately, abolishing nuclear weapons before they destroy the world is not an utterly utopian prospect.  Thanks to popular pressure and disarmament treaties, the number of nuclear weapons around the globe has been reduced since 1986 from about 70,000 to 12,700.  Moreover, a UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, crafted and approved by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations, went into effect in January 2021.

Unfortunately, none of the world’s nine nuclear powers has signed or ratified this nuclear weapons abolition treaty.  Until they do so and, therefore, stop producing, stockpiling, and distributing nuclear weapons to other countries, the world will continue to live in a state of nuclear peril, subject only to occasional flashes of sanity by these same nuclear-armed nations.

Surely, people around the world deserve a better future.