THE resignation of retired Marine Corps General “Mad Dog” Mattis from his post as defence secretary of the world’s most powerful imperialist power is, predictably, being treated by liberal interventionists as a setback. For them it is.
Let us be clear. Any measure that limits the power of the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries is, without qualification, a good thing.
The career of this man Mattis is a Cook’s Tour of US military adventures. His first foreign foray was to protect Saudi Arabia in the 1990-91 Gulf war.
Noted for his intellectual pretensions, before his first deployment to Iraq he reportedly instructed his subordinates to undergo “cultural sensitivity” training.
In a subsequent deployment to Afghanistan he buttressed this approach with an injunction to “be polite, be courteous and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
He gave practical effect to this approach in the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, most spectacularly in the destruction of Fallujah.
In coming days Mattis will be presented as the antithesis of his commander-in-chief. And the classics-quoting, super-fit “warrior monk” does indeed present a different picture to his president, who has neither a sculptured body nor intellectual pretensions.
But these differences are not simply of style but of strategic direction. Mattis is among the more intelligent of US government bureaucrats who, despite differences of emphasis, adhere to the common positions of the big business and banking lobbies represented by the Republican and particularly the Democratic Party.
These boil down to an increasingly problematic attempt to project the full spectrum of US military and diplomatic power to protect US corporate interests.
This is an increasingly difficult task given the scale of the US debt mountain, the damage done to the stability and credibility of the capitalist order by the crash and the increasing unwillingness of other global and regional powers to bow to US domination.
The relative certainties of the cold war, when Soviet power constrained US adventurism, gave way to a brief period of US global hegemony.
That is under pressure in today’s bear-pit of competing and temporary alliances, weakened international institutions and the dog-eat-dog contest of narrow national interests.
The damage done to the highly contrived image of US military superiority by successive generations of Third World combatants of a varying ideological disposition, and the unwillingness of US citizens to volunteer as cannon fodder, is another factor.
Donald Trump came to power precisely because he, or at least his advisers, has a better grasp of the working-class mindset than his more obviously patrician rivals.
Trump represents, with glorious vulgarity, rank opportunism, unbounded cynicism and a startling hypocrisy, a bid — by a section of the US elite — to fashion an economic nationalist alternative to the mounting risks of capitalist globalism.
The parallels with our present situation in Britain, with a ruling class divided over which strategic direction British capital should take, are obvious.
It is not our business to instruct people in our former colonial possessions how to conduct their affairs. Nevertheless, we can draw on long experience to suggest that hitching working-class interests to one or other of the contending sections of the bourgeoisie is not likely to advance the cause of working class political power.
This is why the battle for a People’s Brexit is so important. Unconstrained by EU treaties, single market rules and directives, a left-led Labour government could develop a worker-led industrial strategy; aid industry, invest in training, youth and jobs, social welfare, housing, education and health services; and take the transport, energy and postal service profiteers back into public ownership.
