Earlier this year, Pete Hegseth gave a speech at one of the new, imperialist multilateralism conferences the US now leads against the old liberal order. The delegates in attendance hailed almost entirely from hard-right governments in Central America and the Caribbean.
The thing I noticed first when I’d heard about Hegseth’s appearance was the curious absence of Mexico and Brazil, left-leaning governments that fall within the rough geography of everyone else present.
Then I read the speech, which rolled out a new strategic concept: “Greater North America.” I was struck at how undeniably fascist it was. All the hallmarks were right there in the text.
I’ve been vocal about diagnosing US foreign policy as imperialist, and that got me thinking—Is fascist geopolitics somehow unique? How, if at all, does liberal imperialism differ from fascist imperialism?
So I got researching and writing.
The fruits of that effort come in the form of a new essay for Foreign Policy, where I explain why this geopolitical idea of “Greater North America” is fascist worldmaking. Linking counter-revolution at home to a distinct version of empire (near-)abroad is the only way to make sense of the MAGA bid for both Canada and Greenland in a way that accounts for both the far-right political formation that MAGA represents and the Monroe Doctrine that MAGA has revivified. And the implications are horrific—this new supposed deal between Denmark and the US sets up Greenland to be the new Sudetenland (for those who know their Nazi history).
Something that should not just raise alarm bells but arouse introspection is that the methods of fascist geopolitics are imperialist top to bottom—methods that the US has been intermittently deploying around the world for generations, and with growing frequency the past decade or so. I do not see my argument as an entry in the “Is It Fascism?” debate for precisely that reason.1
We’re in the midst of something different and distinctly dark. It’s neither the sudden emergence of empire nor a departure from empire; it’s a variety of empire. A fascistic variety. And that’s why the region MAGA now dubs “Greater North America” is host to the greatest concentration of American tactics of domination than anywhere else in the world.
Here’s an amuse-bouche from my essay in Foreign Policy:
…In the popular mind, fascism is thought of as a domestic political project. But fascist great powers of the 20th century all championed imperialist campaigns in their regions that were distinct in their violent ambition as compared to their liberal imperialist counterparts. Scholars like Paul Sweezy and Aimé Césaire even saw fascism as a mutation of imperialism. Fascists and imperialists alike engage in military buildups, expand territory through conquest, construct exclusionary spheres of influence with other great powers, and impose settler colonialism and unequal exchange on foreign territories. Fascist foreign policy is imperialist. But it also has a violently counterrevolutionary edge.
MAGA can be understood as an elite counterrevolutionary project that serves the interests of capital by using the state to impose violence on its enemies and redistribute wealth upward. The goal is to overturn the legacy of the New Deal order and the civil rights that came with it. MAGA’s Greater North America is the overseas extension of this project: providing aid to reactionary governments, subverting progressive and socialist ones, and repressing organized labor by any means across the hemisphere.
Every empire lies to itself about what it’s doing, but the engine of fascist empire is a stab-in-the-back myth that treats conspiratorial grievance as its motor fuel. It accounts for real suffering in the present by blaming often-fake political betrayals in the past…
Read the full piece at Foreign Policy. (If you’re a patron and hit a paywall let me know!)
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Fascism is a form of counter-revolutionary politics but not all counter-revolutionary political formations are fascist.
I hit the paywall