Superpower competition has given way to great power jockeying.

2025 US National Security Strategy

The dream of US imperialists—that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, they would be able to run the globe as a singular hegemon—has come crashing down. From 9/11 to the resurgence of mass protest movements in the 2000’s, their own failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the rise of Russia and China as real imperial competitors, it is clear to everyone observing world events that there will be no unipolar world. As much as the US empire remains the dominant military power in the world, economically, culturally, and politically, the world is increasingly multi-polar.  Increasingly, the conflicts racking the world resemble not the Cold War era struggles for domination between two superpowers competing to divide the globe, but rather the WW1 era, in which several “great powers” competed, fighting through economic, political, and militarily means over spheres of influence and access to critical natural resources, especially the key routes for transporting oil and extracting the minerals that fuel consumer gadgets.

The resurgence of multi-polar great power competition alters/shapes how people interpret global events and how they engage in real-world politics and resistance movements. First, it can lead to a sense that the world is just “crazy”, anarchic, or unpredictable—think of how often moves like the Russian invasion of Ukraine or US moves to control Greenland are rendered as madness on the part of Putin or Trump, rather than entirely unjust and entirely rational moves (from the standpoint of imperialism). Also contributing to the also leads other countries to want to assert themselves on the world scale, always at a high cost for the poorest and most oppressed.

In the US, these vast changes in the world alongside the growth of social media (and resultant loss of critical thinking facilities), have given rise to two main positions: the revival of early 20th century social-chauvinism, and variations of rooting for whatever countries are currently opposed to US imperialism, a zombie resurrection of mid 20th century Trotskyism walking among us. Both of these positions stand opposed to genuine anti-imperialism and have actively worked (oftentimes together) to kneecap genuine anti-imperialism.

The morally bankrupt social chauvinists in and out of office

[Kamala Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2024 DNC

God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period… We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.

Former Israeli ambassador Michael Herzog

any Palestinians a speaking slot, while the Biden-Harris administration was actively funding and arming Israel’s genocide, and while (yes, also speaking at the DNC) Chicago’s progressive mayor Brandon Johnson was unleashing a wave of surveillance and repression against anti-DNC protesters. AOC might be a more savvy politician than  Johnson (a low bar to be sure), but practically, politically, and morally, they made the same choice: to sacrifice the Palestinian (and Yemeni, and Iranian, and Lebanese, and Syrian) people in the fire of Israeli weapons to endorse Killer Kamala. The 2024 DNC is a particularly unique snapshot because it was one of the times that the progressive in the Democratic Party could have proved that their theory of change actually worked—AOC and her squad-mates could have publicly refused to vote for or endorse the Democratic candidate unless they reversed Biden’s genocidal policies (a position that hundreds of thousands of regular people took in the last election), using the unique moment of Biden dropping out to force change.

career clearly is going nowhere, he could have put the party on notice by canceling the convention if the Biden government did not stop the genocide. Instead, Johnson spoke at the convention, hit the road for Killer Kamala, and took the millions in federal funding to beef up the Chicago Police Department so they could repress those who were willing to take a moral stand against the DNC at the protests Behind Enemy Lines led to confront those coronating the next butcher of Gaza.

These acts of repugnant cowardice are not the exception to the rule for the various progressives and socialists endorsed by organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); they are the rule. The latest social democratic wunderkind is, of course, NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani. After refusing to condemn his own comments in support of Palestine during the Democratic primary, Mamdani has been walking them back as fast as possible as mayor, just last week denouncing the Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa (and throwing his wife under the bus in the process). In practice, Mamdani has done nothing to tamp down the widespread use of the NYPD to repress and harass protesters, including members of Behind Enemy Lines. Despite denouncing the Trump administration’s gangster kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Mamdani has done nothing to address the fact that Maduro is being detained in New York City. While Mamdani has no authority over the federal MDC prison, he could absolutely take a stand against the kidnapping by ordering NYPD not to take part in transporting Maduro or providing security to the Trump kangaroo trial of Maduro and his wife.

The failure of any of these elected social democrats and progressive politicians to do anything material to stand up to US imperialism is baked into the very cake of progressive electoral politics. More or less across the board, these politicians and their funders in unions, NGO’s, and groups like the DSA have decided that they will prioritize various social reforms in the US in exchange for going along with the program of US imperialism to a lesser or greater extent. Certainly, they will not call the US an empire. Certainly, they will not take any action to materially impede the slaughter of other people by US weapons and with US dollars. They are playing the role of the 20th-century social chauvinists—what Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin described as people who called themselves socialists, but actively supported the imperialist WW1.

The trending revival of social-chauvinism is dangerous not because it mainly finds a home among young people standing up to US imperialism, but because it draws people in and redirects their dissent into conventional political channels that ultimately serve the ruling class. Our contemporary social chauvinists use their lengthy and thoughtful podcasts, their glossy quarterly publications, Montrose avenue storefronts, and organizer jobs at unions to shepherd people who are becoming aware of the horrors of imperialism back into the warm arms of the ruling class, mainly through electoral campaigns. Like the European social chauvinists of Lenin’s day who called themselves socialists while voting to fund WW1, our contemporary social chauvinists are content to knock on doors for some new electoral scheme wrapped in a keffiyeh, losing their souls in the process.

The Zombie Trotskyists of flag Twitter, come to life

The position that has gained popularity among young people, standing up to US imperialism, is the trick-mirror-opposite of social-chauvinism: various trends and organizations that make some variation on the claim that anti-imperialism means extending political support to any country currently in conflict with US imperialism, in (mostly) words and actions. This includes revolting opportunist hacks like the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), welcoming the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, or slightly more serious people, like the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective (AISC), insisting that to oppose the US-Israel war of aggression against Iran, we need to support not just the people of Iran but also its repressive theocratic government.

While these positions often claim a fidelity to a Marxist-Leninst tradition, they have nothing in common with the theory and practice of Vladimir Lenin or Mao Zedong. Instead, they are a pestilent remnant of mid-20th century Trotskyism. While the Trotskyist tradition has also produced its share of State Department Socialists, its US adherents in the mid-20th century— notably Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy—began to argue exactly that: any country opposed to US imperialism was worth of support. This fringe position (seriously… we heard these people argue for anti-communist Saddam Hussein’s progressive bona fides in the early 2000’s) began to grow a larger following with the growth of social media Leftism morphing into today’s Zombie-Trotskyism.

organizing boring parade-protests, but also working with the social chauvinists to keep real resistance to US imperialism from rising up. The most grotesque example of this unity is the long-standing alliance between FRSO and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson: FRSO, which organizationally leads many of the large protests in Chicago, has maintained a years-long detestable silence on his repression of pro-Palestine protests, continuing to feature Johnson at their events. They refused to criticize him for hosting the genocidal DNC, instead praising him for giving them permits for porta-potties (we’re not making this up), and had their protest safety “marshals” thanked by Johnson’s hand-picked CPD chief, Larry Snelling.¹

Those on the more intellectually rigorous end of this trend, like the AISC, seem to have adopted from the US Left a bizarre fixation with language. We think good slogans concentrate politics, but we don’t actually see what difference it makes to demand solidarity with the Iranian government rather than just its people, other than to isolate anti-imperialists from a potential base of support, notably the Iranian’s in diaspora who rightfully despise the Iranian government and US imperialism. Uniting the fixation on language, goofy politics, and Zombie-Trotskyism is a lack of faith in the masses of people to be struggled with and won to genuine anti-imperialist politics.

Generational warfare and genuine anti-imperialism

One of the (many) problems posed by the rise of social media as the central place where people learn about and get involved in politics is short historical memory. Jeremy Varon’s new book Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War describes the millions of people who took to the streets in the US to oppose the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That movement (which certainly had its flaws and shortcomings) was propelled by political trends and practices that are seemingly on the edge of extinction: the tactical militancy and courage of anarchists and the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, the moral clarity of pacifists and other religious people, and the deep experiences of those who fought against imperialist aggression in Central America in the 1980’s. Perhaps even stranger for today’s social media generation to imagine is that people from those different streams of struggle would plan together and struggle it out hard in open, public meetings and forums, face to face.

Ironically, both the Zombie Trotskyists and the social chauvinists point to their meager organizational gains to claim that things are actually getting better. “The Left is growing!”, they proclaim. To which we can only answer: we know, that’s the fucking problem here. Without nostalgia, but with critical seriousness, we can learn from past experiences rather than repeating the worst of them.

As anti-imperialists, we should mourn the souls lost to our own empire. But we should also recognize that the world is not going to go back to a single superpower anytime soon. The regional conflicts, wars of aggression and extermination, and inter-imperialist conflicts generated by the rise of multipolarity provide new opportunities to expose the many crimes of US imperialism and to bring forward new waves of resistance, if there are people willing to seize those opportunities.

Regardless of what friends it does or doesn’t make us, Behind Enemy Lines is committed to carrying out that mission—going to the people in any way that we can, and dedicating our very lives and our very beings to becoming the people who will bring down this empire once and for all.

1. See “The DNC is that way!”: A summation of our fight to shut down the DNC for Gaza for more on the destructive role of FRSO during the 2024 DNC protests and the repression of protesters by Brandon Johnson. ↩︎