An argument with some leftists ; or, reflections on the nature of the international system

As a reaction against the many crimes and hypocrisies of American foreign policy, a number of people on the far left (notably contributors to the online newsletter, 'Grayzone') have, for a long time, denied reports of atrocities by the Syrian government (or its Russian backers) or news of the threatened elimination of Uighur culture by the Chinese authorities.

There can be no doubt that the United States has fostered the subversion and overthrow of governments ; that it has fought very destructive wars of imperial control ; that it has promoted relationships of economic exploitation ; and that it has maintained hugely wasteful military expenditure. It is also true that it was the dominant global power during the Cold War, and for some time afterwards. (In terms of military expenditure, it still outclasses its rivals ; from the economic point of view, it is clearly rivalled by China. The historian Paul Kennedy's prediction, in 'The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers' (1988), that the United States will become the economic victim of its own imperial overstretch, may well prove to be true. However, the United States has never controlled the international system ; it has been (and, to some extent, still is) the dominant power in an essentially anarchic world of international relations, in which other powers do 'their own thing.' That is a vital distinction.

The hand of the United States is not behind everything which happens in the world ; and terrible things happen without its involvement. That may seem a statement of the extremely obvious ; but there are people who are very unwilling to face up to the implications of this fact. Syrian atrocities are not 'fake news', manufactured by the United States. The Syrian regime is perfectly capable of causing terrible damage to its own citizens, and many other things besides, as abundant evidence from many decades shows. The protests of governments in the Global North (or 'the West', as orthodox parlance would have it) about Syria, the Uighurs, Hong Kong etc may well be extremely hypocritical and selective, but they are not on that account untrue.