The U.S. government is embracing paramilitarism in anticipation of such a scenario. It's normal for U.S. police to accommodate armed right-wing vigilantes at public events, especially during the last year's Black Lives Matter protests. Since 2011, the FBI has decentralized its operations, and therefore freed the numerous extremists within its ranks to conduct low-level investigations with impunity. There's even evidence that the U.S. intelligence community has been behind the manufacturing and propagation of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which has radicalized many reactionaries to participate in militia activity. There's also a movement towards popularizing private police forces, with the app Citizen aiming to create its own corporate security firm.
Despite these efforts to fortify the armed strength of the counterrevolutionaries, the fascist Indian state's parallel proliferations of violence are proving to speed up the process towards revolution. As the Indian Marxist Saikat Bhattacharya assessed two years ago, before the bleedings of the Indian police forces that we've seen since then:
This region is full of revolutionary potential. India, Bangladesh Nepal and Pakistan from the point of demography can become a stunning story of economic growth. Nepal has already seen anti-kingship/monarchy movements by armed communists. The successful merger of armed communists and constitutional communists and their electoral victory may prove to become a new model for Third World revolutionaries in the coming days... the New Delhi Hindutva fascist regime is talking about pushing Muslims of Eastern India into Bangladesh. These will create deep tensions within Bangladesh and ultimately destroy its economy. Thus revolutionaries may capitalise in Bangladesh too, despite the fact that the first two stages are partially complete there.
Will the same accelerations towards revolution occur in Colombia, Haiti, and the other most brutal neo-colonies following their current crackdowns? History suggests so.
The precedents, both historical and present, are there for a country's armed forces becoming ineffective against an insurgency amid destabilizing factors. So the American state is cultivating unaccountable armed entities to provide reinforcements should the police, the National Guard, and the military become reduced to such a compromised position. The questions are: will these destabilizing factors come to the U.S.? And if they do, will this paramilitary backup plan be enough to defeat the rebels?
The military's economic-support system
What are these destabilizing factors that can wreak such fatal damage to a capitalist state's armed forces? As for the example countries I've mentioned so far, the root of the instability is economic dysfunction, to the effect that the masses are incentivized to mount strikes, demonstrations, and armed rebellions. These actions from the masses have appeared in neo-colonies like Colombia and India, and may conclude with a repeat of the Russian revolution within these and other neo-colonies, because these countries are designed to be impoverished. As the Marxist scholar Michael Parenti has said, the Global South isn't underdeveloped, it's overexploited. So the masses there tend to gain a greater revolutionary consciousness than the masses within the imperialist countries do.
Due to U.S. imperialism's ongoing economic hegemony over its neo-colonies, the revolutionary struggle within both the neo-colonies and the core imperialist countries is discontinuous and wrought with mostly successful obstacles. Global capital has been weakening with the decline in U.S. profits over the last half-century and the Covid-19 global depression, but the imperialists are still thus far able to hold back the brewing revolutionary tide aside from in Bolivia. What will kickstart a global loss of social-support systems for capitalist states worldwide, and will make the armed forces of these states less able to access resources, is the coming collapse of the dollar.
There's debate among economists about whether a drastic dollar decline will happen within this next year (as the finance expert Stephen Roach has been predicting), but the shift towards a multi-polar world has made this collapse inevitable. Washington's hubristic sabotage of its global relations, as well as its inadvertent solidification of an anti-U.S. bloc through its aggressions against its rivals, have accelerated the global transition away from the dollar as the reserve currency. As historian Alfred McCoy assessed in anticipation of the 2020s:
For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness. After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2030 the U.S. dollar eventually loses its special status as the world's dominant reserve currency. Suddenly, there are punitive price increases for American imports ranging from clothing to computers. And the costs for all overseas activity surges as well, making travel for both tourists and troops prohibitive. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, its forces begin to pull back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. Such a desperate move, however, comes too late. Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying its bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.
This outcome is considered by the U.S. imperialist technocrats to be a strategic nightmare scenario for Washington. In 2000, the neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century warned in its report Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century that "as the leader of a global network of alliances and strategic partnerships, U.S. armed forces cannot retreat into a 'Fortress America.'"
As imperial decline prompts Washington to try to sustain the Afghanistan war through privatizing U.S. forces there, to expand its military occupations into the areas surrounding China in an attempt to retain dominance over Oceania, and to plan for fortifying the U.S. military presence in the areas surrounding Russia, this financial house of cards is going to ruin these desperate attempts to protect U.S. hegemony. As McCoy describes, even Washington's most populated neo-colony India will be forced to buck the empire's strategic partnership.
This will leave both the U.S. and India--as well as the numerous other neo-colonial states and U.S. client states that depend on Washington for suppressing their populations--wrought with instability despite Washington's frantic efforts to consolidate its military power into the American hemisphere. Like Washington's great expansions of AFRICOM over the last decade and the growing U.S. occupations of Oceania, the empire's militarization of Latin America's right-wing regimes via SOUTHCOM have been about holding back the growing influence that China, Russia, and Iran hold over the empire's neo-colonial asset countries in the Global South. Yet when U.S. financial dominance inevitably goes away, not even all these projections of imperial armed might will be enough to keep Washington dominant.
"Yang Jin, an expert at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that when the US imposes pressure on China and Russia, it also withdraws from many regions with unsolved problems, and these regions such as the Middle East and Central Asia are all closely related to the interests of China and Russia," China's Global Times reported this week. "So Beijing and Moscow must keep close coordination to handle the upcoming situation, including how to establish a new order to replace the US-dominated one once the latter gets totally dysfunctional, Yang Jin said."
While Washington will be able to opportunistically sow instability amid this global breakdown of the most vulnerable states, like how the imperialists have destabilized and carved up Libya and northeastern Syria over this last decade, the kinds of resource extractions that the U.S. has been able to carry out through these interventions won't make up for the empire's losses of global productive forces. If the imperialists can no longer exploit the labor of the Indians, or the Colombians, or other victims of neo-colonialism, they won't be able to sustain their internal economic structure. A deep depression will indeed occur within the U.S., one that both intensifies the revolts from the country's masses and weakens the country's armed forces.
After we see the global U.S. military retreat that McCoy predicts, Washington will shift its war machine and its capital towards trying to hold on to the imperial holdings that it still has access to. A 2019 Pentagon report calls for the U.S. to extract untapped Arctic oil in the coming decades of glacial thaw, showing that the imperialists will go north to dip into its alliance's remaining natural reserves. (This trend of imperialism migrating northward is reflected by how Washington's imperial partner Canada plans to get military drones of its own by 2025.) Disaster capitalism will proliferate within both the borders of the imperialist countries, and within the neo-colonial areas that the imperialists still control.
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