Abolition Vs. Empire, At Home As It Is Abroad

A new essay of mine for The Nation. It predicted the Iran War. I had to rewrite a bunch of it over the weekend. Stay for the part about abolishing JSOC 

Edited by Sam Thielman

AFTER THE U.S. KIDNAPPED Nicolas Maduro, The Nation asked me to contribute a piece about the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy under Trump. This being January—and the writer being me—I connected it to the ICE horrors unfolding in Minnesota. What we do abroad is what we do at home. 

It became a piece tracing the lineage of Trump Second-Term foreign and domestic policies within the War on Terror as each achieved certain aspirations of the War on Terror in earlier phases and in doing so mirrored each other. ICE has reached a certain death-squad maturation long heralded in its normalized roundups over the past 20-plus years, for instance. And the big element the piece warned about, since I was writing it in January, is that after Maduro, Trump feels invincible. The piece warned that Iran (and Cuba) would be next. 

Then events took shape before the piece was published, and I had to do some weekend rewriting. 

It arrived this morning. I had given the piece the headline Abolition Versus Empire, since those are the stakes the piece lays out. 

Historians will spend decades debating the exact moment when the US empire discredited itself and irrevocably hobbled the international law that it masquerades as. [Canadian Prime Minister Mark] Carney marked it at the Greenland crisis. Many others mark it at the beginning of Israel’s US-sponsored genocide in Gaza in October 2023. I would offer that it’s the War on Terror—corresponding as it does with all but the first 10 years of US global dominance—that defines American power during its period of supremacy. It is an era in which the United States inflicted sustained violence throughout the Global South and called it “order.” But the waves of resistance that US actions generated exposed American weakness. Resentment over the agonies of the War on Terror played an enormous role in Trump’s rise to power.

Every historical era is shaped by its predecessor. The War on Terror was shaped by the Cold War, and it now shapes the empire Trump is constructing. That makes the path of resistance to this new era of imperialism clear: The tools of the War on Terror must be destroyed before Trump uses them to finish building his world order, at home and abroad. …

It has become fashionable to speak of Minnesota as the War on Terror coming home. The truth is that the War on Terror was always being waged simultaneously at home and overseas. Federal forces targeted non-Muslim immigrant communities along with Muslim ones as soon as the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. Not only were ICE and CBP created in that climate, but as early as the multi-state raids on Swift meatpacking plants in 2006, ICE was terrorizing working-class immigrants at scale. What is happening now is that US citizens are getting a taste of the treatment previously reserved for noncitizens—and for marginalized communities who live the vulnerable reality of conditional citizenship.

There's a lot in here that I planned on discussing, but the Iran War is now underway and that has to take precedence. But there's an element in the piece that at a later date I want to come back to: the abolition of the Joint Special Operations Command: 

Months before Maduro’s kidnapping, when the US military was blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean, Adm. Mitch Bradley, then the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), approved the shocking "double-tap" strike on survivors clinging to the wreckage of a boat that the US had just destroyed. Killing the shipwrecked is as blatant a violation of the Geneva Conventions as exists. The Pentagon’s own manual on the law of war uses "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked" as an example of a "clearly illegal" command that service members have an affirmative duty to refuse. The New York Times reported that one of the aircraft involved in the strike was painted like a civilian plane. That is known as the war crime of "perfidy," and it’s the central charge before the military commission trying the Guantánamo Bay detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of blowing up the USS Cole in 2000.

JSOC, the signature military command of the War on Terror, did not descend to this level overnight. Nearly 25 years of relentless deployment has resulted in a grisly moral rot that has recently been documented in books like David Philipps’s Alpha, Matthew Cole’s Code Over Country, and Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel. A command structure that orders the shipwrecked killed cannot be tolerated by any military that postures as lawful, to say nothing of honorable. Special operations must be reconfigured under one that can be trusted to obey the law.

Anyway, more on this at a later date, but I felt like a call to abolish JSOC was both necessary under the circumstances and unthinkable as a "serious" option. I want to make it thinkable. I'll write more about this later. For now, I hope you'll check out the piece. 

IF YOU WANT a quick but comprehensive cheat sheet about the first two days of the Iran War, our friend Derek Davison has you covered. Frankly, this saves me a lot of time. 

THIS IS AT BEST a sub-sub-plot of the geopolitics of the Iran War, but: The Washington Post reported on Saturday that it wasn't just Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urging Trump to war, it was also Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The piece is anonymously sourced to four officials and could easily be buck-passing as a hedge against the whole thing turning into the highly foreseeable disaster it's going to turn into. But at the same time, MBS rose to power by launching the devastation of Yemen and pursuing escalation against Iran until the 2019 attack on Saudi Aramco brought sobering consequences for his course of action. 

I bring this all up because if the Post is accurate, then MBS just made China lose face—via its first major Middle East initiative, no less. Recall that in 2023, the Chinese brokered what was supposed to be a detente between Riyadh and Teheran. It was supposed to be significant that China was a signatory to the detente, meaning the Beijing put its reputation on the line as a way to guarantee a durable reduction in regional tension. So much for that! If the Post is right, I would look in the coming days to see what China's posture to the Saudis becomes. 

MY DEAR FRIEND Laura Hudson is a polymath as well as a fantastic writer. Many of you will know her from her time at WIRED, or her contributions to The Verge or Feminist Frequency, or her screenwriting on the HBO adaptation of DMZ. The hardcore among you know Laura as the founder of the greatest-ever site of comic-book criticism, Comics Alliance. The hardest-core among you know her from the Game of Thrones podcast we did together for several years and two news outlets. 

What you don't know is that Laura is a tremendous and ambitious comic book writer. You're about to find out. 

Along with one of her best friends, Tim Leong—we all worked together at WIRED long ago—Laura is writing a new series for the independent comic book company Mad Cave. It's called Exploit, and it is highly relevant to our interlocking social crises. Laura and Tim create the journalist Kirby Kuo and aim her at the tech oligarch Cole Saxon. (What a name.) I've read the first issue and it's excellent. All I can tell you is that Laura has trained for this her entire life and so her comics debut was always going to be tremendous. Tell your comic-book retailer—you can find them here—that you want Exploit #1 when it hits stores on Wednesday, and you can preorder it and every subsequent issue, as well as the upcoming collected edition, from Mad Cave.