In typically servile fashion, the governments of Australia and New Zealand have both pledged support to the US-led coalition’s actions in the Red Sea. The finer and somewhat curious details of their respective contributions are worth noting, however.

While Australia’s small detachment of non-operational ADF personnel were for some time missing in action, New Zealand’s deployment — totalling six military personnel — has been even more puzzling. At a bemusing media conference, where his foreign minister championed the desperate plight of ‘innocent consumers’ worldwide, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon reiterated his government’s commitment to ‘New Zealand’s long history of defending freedom of navigation both in the Middle East and closer to home.’

What this curious allusion to New Zealand’s history in the Middle East means is anyone’s guess, though he may be referring to the Sinai Campaign of 1916. If so, then he is stretching the meaning of euphemism, to say the least.

During the first world war, the forces deployed by the British in the region did in fact include the NZ Mounted Rifles Brigade, and they were indeed there to secure the Suez Canal’s shipping lanes against the Ottomans. It was also precisely this same brigade that would later partake in a massacre of Palestinians at al Sarafand — a massacre that never met with recognition, justice, or reparations. Then as now, New Zealand’s commitment to the ‘freedom of navigation’ made it an eager and enthusiastic party to war crimes.

After a hundred days of what can only be described as history’s most concerted campaign of technologically advanced industrial slaughter in Gaza, the US and UK governments have invoked a hallowed tradition of the West’s political elites — bombing an Arab country in times of crisis and loss of face. Following in the footsteps of every one of their predecessors in recent decades, the Biden and Sunak administrations have instigated the aerial bombardment of Yemen, the most beleaguered and destitute country in the region, in cold and cruel retribution.

Even talk of the cynical prioritisation of profits and international trade doesn’t fully explain this kind of vindictiveness. After all, the US and its vassal states are not the only bloc which values the Red Sea traffic, yet no other faction has launched a military excursion to secure its smooth operation. In fact, rival superpowers like China have continued to prevaricate and pay lip service to ‘the restoration of peace’ by ‘relevant parties’ even as US diplomats effectively implore them to rein in regional allies and to give the coalition an exit.

No. Shipping lanes don’t explain the murderous stupidity and cruelty in the Red Sea any more than oil explains the criminal and wholesale decimation of Iraq — at least not entirely.

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There is a specificity to American imperium that many of us, including those on the Left, forget at our own peril. More than any other superpower, the US is distinctive for packaging military, economic, and ideological interests into an over-determined imperative. This is what ‘security’ refers to, and maritime security is no different. The aim of this imperative is less the monopoly on trade and resources and more the maintenance of geopolitical hegemony.

One may argue that this is hardly unique to the US, and its rivals since the Cold War have adopted the geostrategic imperative of security to a more or less exacting, and therefore frightening, standard. This is partly true. What distinguishes the US, however, are two important things. First is the globally encompassing military reach through a wide spanning and tightly interconnected archipelago of bases and installations. Second, and perhaps more importantly, is its capacity as well as penchant for coercive diplomacy, to which it subjects not only its victims and puppets in the Global South, but also its own vassals in the North.

This strategy is a result of object lessons, learned the hard way over the course of a half century following the world wars. In the quest for unchallenged world supremacy, it became clear to successive US administrations that the post-war international order is riven with contradictions, which it could either exploit or succumb to. The bankrolling of military Keynesianism and the promotion of liberal democracy were key pillars in this unwieldy edifice, and their results provided the good empire with a bulwark against the evil one: clusters of protectorates, dependencies, and client states in Western Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific. Flush with war booty in the form of US dollars and sophisticated weaponry, elites in these countries were easily cultivated.

With the demise of its Cold War rival, however, the immediate challenge for the head of the ‘Atlantic Community’ was to keep its vassals in line. This is precisely why NATO has persisted for so long: it acted, in the words of the recently and finally deceased Kissinger, as ‘a counter to Europe’, in the same way that the United Nations Security Council acts as a counter to the UN itself. Far from being a deterrent to the Soviets, the organisation has been from its very inception a means to strong arm recalcitrant or newly enlisted states (eg a unified Germany) into compliance, not least by implicating them in its own bloodletting. Blitzkriegs in Yugoslavia and the Gulf heralded an era of ‘humanitarian’ warfare and intervention, the purpose of which was not limited to cowing pariahs and renegades. These expeditions also acted as proving grounds where camp followers can earn their stripes (eg Ukraine) and blood their untested soldiers.

If this sounds more like a description of imperial Rome than a modern hegemon, then it is due to design rather than accident. One can hardly find a more fitting explanation than the one provided by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former National Security Advisor:

To put it in the terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of [US] imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pli­ant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

Militarism, clearly, is as integral for Pax Americana as it was for its ancient predecessors. More to the point, though, is that regular and ritual warfare is required to maintain the pecking order, bestow favours, exact tribute, and test loyalties. This is especially vital when worldwide unrest is brewing.

The current juncture calls for exactly this kind of blood sacrifice to imperium. It is difficult to recall a moment in recent history when elites and masses in Western and Anglo countries have been so diametrically and passionately at odds over a crisis in the South. Even Iraq never succeeded in mobilising such a sustained popular movement across the West, though in important ways it set the grounds for it. As should be clear by now, the priority for US strategists is not to appeal to this movement or to diffuse it, but to ensure that those in its coalition of the willing are precisely that: onboard and willing.

Little old New Zealand is no exception. Memes aside, the going notion regarding its commitment of six of its Defence Force personnel is that this is in keeping with recent history — whereby broader coalitions, regardless of how asymmetrical in resources and contributions, are mobilised against claims of unilateral and unpopular aggression. By now, however, the idea that the US has any interest in playing by the rules, or in appearing to play by the rules, should be laughable. For the last four months, it has abjured any modicum of respect for the international community and its precious rules-based order and demonstrated a willingness to flout every law in the proverbial book. New Zealand’s meagre contribution is not so much to substantiate an alibi as it is to swear allegiance, come what may.

Of course, Oceania itself is far from being an American lake, which is why it has soared up the list of geostrategic priorities in recent years. As the war on terror entered its second decade, Obama’s ‘Pacific pivot’ signalled a recalibration in US threat assessment. From the TPPA to AUKUS, overtures have been regularly made in an effort to consolidate the empire’s settler garrisons, including New Zealand and Australia, and to manoeuvre them as coordinated and compliant geostrategic assets. The deployment of a handful of military personnel is therefore a vindication of US strategy, and a reassurance that, regardless of what most others in the country (and indeed the region) might have to say, New Zealand remains firmly within the empire’s camp, as well as its good graces.

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If I am belabouring the point about imperial geostrategy, it is not to quibble over the analytic nuances of our critical response, but to emphasise the fact that, when it comes down to it, the issue here is just that: one of strategy. For the upper cadres of the imperial elite, groomed by a military-finance complex, steeped in a quasi-millenarian warrior ethos, and drunk on American exceptionalism, a strategy amounts to little more than a gamble. Being the recidivist gambler that it is, the US has time and again hedged its bets on the possibility that, whatever course of action it chooses to take, it will come out on top. A half a century into the game, it appears to have paid off, in the sense that everyone else, including people and the planet, are losing.

This monstrous situation makes any talk of US ‘decline’, ideological defeat, and plummeting popularity on the world stage completely moot. What distinguishes this imperium from its ancient predecessors is that its resort to staggering levels of barbarism and impunity — far from signalling its decadence and imminent demise — reflects the fine-tuning of a war machine working at optimal capacity. As political theorist Ali Kadri has argued at length, this war machine is the principle means by which capitalism reproduces its life cycle today, regenerating life in the centre by extinguishing it in the peripheries. Nor is this just ‘life’ in the abstract, but very much in the concrete sense in which we might speak of ‘democratic life’. The exercise of sovereign power in the North — even if it is just the deployment of six military personnel — is enacted in the process of abrogating sovereignty in the South. The possibility of popular and peaceful protest in the North — even if it is just a basic demand for ceasefire and human rights —is never more potent than when it is made impossible in the South.

One need hardly be a political theorist to know this on an intimate level. At a Wellington rally yesterday, a speaker poignantly observed that what makes this situation so unbearable is precisely that it is so bearable. At no other time in living memory has it been so plain to so many people in the North that our parasitic mode of life is not a life worth its name. This recognition is perhaps the greatest strength and potential of the popular movement for Palestine. After decades of systematic embourgeoisement, union and social movements in the imperial and metropolitan centres have become dominated by a labour aristocracy and cultural elite (including its ‘decolonial’ variants) that has been all too content with the realities of militarised global apartheid. It is possible that this status quo is already, rapidly crumbling. But whether the popular movement can finally dethrone this class and transform its organisational structures and tactics remains to be seen.

Ultimately, this will depend on the same condition for dismantling the tributary state system: the incorporation of the protest movement into an anti-systemic struggle through escalation. In its heyday, anti-imperialism meant precisely this: the practical evaluation of imperial power in any one theatre — a practical evaluation that only crystallises through action. Regardless of what we might want to say about Ansar Allah — a discussion for another time — their actions at Bab el-Mandeb have brought to the fore of public consciousness what entire volumes and libraries in infrastructure and logistics studies could not. If there was ever an example to follow, it is there.

Image: Wikimedia Commons