For this reason, Washington's proxy war on Lebanon is focused not just on getting the anti-Zionist Hezbollah out of the country's government, but on wresting away China's influence. The public relations campaign that imperialist leaders like Emmanuel Macron carried out following last year's Beirut explosion shows the U.S. bloc is willing to exploit any tragedy within the country in order to get its way. The same destabilization tactic is now being applied to Iraq as the U.S. ends its combat operations within the country; due to the conditions the Iraq invasion created, Iraq is teetering on the edge of civil war, which the U.S. sees as a favorable route for stopping the spread of Iranian and Chinese influence.
This desire for chaos applies even more to Ethiopia, which has been developing towards economic independence through the BRI. With Ethiopia being a highly influential country in the horn of Africa, destroying this progress is a top priority for Washington. Which is apparent from its backing of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front-a terrorist group that started its 2020 insurgency during harvest time so it could sabotage crops, has been hoarding food aid, and uses the country's famine as a propaganda tool for vilifying the Ethiopan and Eritrean governments.
The ideal end goal in the region would be a military intervention, but Washington will be satisfied merely if its proxy succeeds at creating a Libya-esque failed state. Through its meddling, Washington has already brought much of the rest of the horn of Africa into such disarray. And as Latin America increasingly embraces China, Washington is applying such destabilization measures to countries like Haiti, which has been subjected to a preemptive counterrevolution via this year's Colombian-perpetrated assassination of its previous president.
Latin America's anti-imperialist countries are targeted more severely, with sanctions being perpetually tightened against Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela while the U.S. sows mercenary subversion within their borders. Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia are being attacked in more subtle ways, involving the backing of their internal bourgeoisie and of their reactionary militant factions. Honduras has joined them now that a leftist has again been elected as its president, and Chile also just became a target after electing a candidate who aims to dismantle neoliberalism.
Especially in Latin America, U.S. Cyber Command is part of these destabilization campaigns. This goes both for attempts to recolonize countries that have broken free from imperial control (like when the U.S. sabotaged Venezuela's electrical grid during the 2019 coup attempt), and for attempts to hold onto neo-colonies (like when Colombia experienced internet outages while protesters were trying to expose this year's police brutality within the country). Israel uses the same communications and infrastructure sabotage tactics against Gazans.
In accordance with the hidden nature of modern imperialism, where the imperialist powers are portrayed as being economically independent despite their constant drive to enforce a sphere of influence, all of these hybrid wars are covert. It's never acknowledged by the U.S. that the electrical and internet outages are Cyber Command's doing. And the CIA creates a layer of plausible deniability between itself and the terrorists it backs, with this concealment sometimes involving funding the terror through CIA front groups like the National Endowment for Democracy. This was the case for the NED-funded Hong Kong riots of 2019, which then got replicated in other south Asian regime change targets like Thailand. The U.S. sanctions on Sri Lanka and Cambodia are to prepare them for similar subversion efforts. Extensive ties to China are what these three countries have in common.
The hybrid wars depend on regional U.S. puppet states, which themselves conceal or deny their roles behind the destabilization operations. When Pakistan reports that India is backing terrorists within its borders, India portrays these reports as disinformation. When Yemeni officials say their country has been a victim of Israeli destabilization schemes, the Israelis continue portraying themselves as agents of peace who are being targeted by malicious propaganda. Because Colombia's foreign operations (such as the Haitian assassination) are carried out by the country's mercenaries, it can claim to not be culpable, even though Colombian mercenaries have long been integral to U.S. foreign policy.
Sacrificing the most vulnerable
These proxy warfare countries themselves intertwine in their warfare operations. Colombia is a major benefactor of Israel's military technology, which has allowed for the testing of the "Plan Colombia" anti-guerrilla military operating model. While this model has been embraced as an imperialist route for putting down insurgencies worldwide, Israel has further exported its innovations in militarism by sending weapons to Ukraine. This has had consequences parallel to the atrocities committed by Colombia's death squads and armed forces.
Because U.S. foreign policy elites are operating off of the beliefs that conflict is unavoidable, and that liberalism's triumph must be ensured at all costs, they accept that these cold war maneuvers will come at an extreme human toll. During the last era of great-power competition, millions of lives were lost to Washington's military interventions, proxy wars, sanctions, and installations of genocidal dictatorships. So it's always been a given that the inhabitants of the formerly colonized world, as well as those caught within cold war fronts like Ukraine, will bear the main costs of the new geopolitical clash.
It's in Ukraine where this has been most viscerally apparent. Within half a year after the coup that the U.S. orchestrated in the country in 2014, the new fascist regime retaliated against the successful referendum for Russian annexation by surrounding the city of Luhansk, then subjecting it to constant shelling for several months. During this time, water and electricity were cut off, and no supplies were allowed in or out. The siege, whose purpose was effectively to punish the locals for voting to join Russia, overwhelmed the city's infrastructure while leaving 200 dead. It took seven years to recover the bodies from the mass grave, since the war continues to this day and the site has remained chaotic.
The victims were killed not by the Russians, but by the Ukrainian Army, which also facilitated war crimes in the neighboring villages by assigning Nazi militias to violently occupy them. As the country has descended into failed state status, with the pandemic accelerating the process by overwhelming an inadequate healthcare system, these militias have filled the power vacuum. Which has allowed for more persecution of dissidents, journalists, Jews, Romas, and the LGBT community, all under the guise of deterring "Russian aggression." These paramilitary atrocities are participated in jointly with the official armed forces, which regularly shoot refugees along the Belarusian border.
The parallel abuses that the region's other NATO-backed reactionary regimes Poland and Lithuania commit against refugees serve the same purpose: picking off the individuals who've become disposable within the global order that the imperialists have created. These refugees are fleeing to inner Europe, both from the countries to the south and from within Belarus itself, because NATO has rendered these places largely unlivable. Washington is now using the humanitarian fallout to drive this destabilization further, imposing more sanctions on Belarus for allegedly weaponizing the migrant crisis. NATO and the E.U. won't rein in the region's far-right regimes, because they're crucial assets in the military buildup against Russia. Arms budgets have been surging in the Baltic states since Russia again became a challenger to Washington, while Poland and Ukraine have become Washington's key allies in the region.
This sacrificing of those who flee the destruction imperialism causes has been intensifying in correlation with the decline of U.S. hegemony since the USSR's fall. When the Berlin Wall came down, there were six physical walls along borders or in occupied territories worldwide. Now there are at least sixty-three. This exponential growth has partly been a byproduct of the new cold war's military buildup; as places like Scandinavia have joined the drive towards militarization, they've tightened their borders, with Norway having built a border fence with Russia in 2016. (Which is only a correlation, but is still an echo of the last cold war.) It's also been caused by the tightening of U.S. immigration laws that started in the 90s, and the founding of Immigration Customs Enforcement during the first years of the "War on Terror." These have produced the country's ever-growing migrant detention centers, as well as the heavy militarization of U.S. border policy, which has seen troops stationed along the southern border since 2018 with no end in sight.
Washington's militarization of the lands these migrants are fleeing furthers the humanitarian cost of the war the empire is waging. Imperialism's role behind the refugee crises goes beyond the sanctions, the proxy wars, and the invasions. Since 2007 with the introduction of AFRICOM, the U.S. has been intensifying its military buildup throughout Africa, Latin America, Oceania, and southern-to-western Asia. The military occupation has been the most destructive in Africa, facilitating drone strikes which frequently kill civilians and enabling U.S.-friendly despotic regimes like Uganda's dictatorship. In Somalia, the warfare AFRICOM facilitates has settled into a self-perpetuating cycle where Washington cultivates terrorist groups, "fights" those groups through drone strikes which mainly kill non-combatants, then brings further terrorism by giving propaganda ammunition to the jihadists.
Washington's militarization of these other regions has brought similar consequences. SOUTHCOM's cooperation with the Bolsonaro regime has made another dictatorial coup within the country more likely by fortifying the country's internal militarization. And Washington has been propping up India's brutal BJP regime due to India being vital in countering China. The BJP's colonial occupation of Kashmir and genocide against Muslims are simply seen as more costs of perpetuating the war. Washington's anti-Chinese military adventurism surrounding India, and use of India as a regional proxy warfare tool, wouldn't be possible if the U.S. didn't court the regime.
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