Empire Building at Home and Abroad

Edited by Spencer Ackerman

MIKE, WHICH IS NOT HIS NAME, works in Industry City. That’s the disused warehouse space recently repurposed into an upmarket don’t-call-it-a-shopping-mall on the western shores of Brooklyn. [Those of us who remember when everything from under the Third Ave. BQE to the water was chop shops and sex stores will always just call it "Sunset Park"—Spencer]  He was driving home with a colleague down Second Ave. last week, seeing the usual—the omnipresent police barricades put up to cordon off this celebrity party or that parade, the TV producers packing up their equipment after a live shot, the indoor playgrounds—when things went haywire. 

“Got to the corner at 3rd,” Mike texted me on Monday, “saw another line of barricades, a cruiser, AND A GIANT CROWD waving Venezuelan flags.” It was around 10:30 at night on January 3 just outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, and the president of Venezuela was going to jail.

This is at least the forty-first time the United States has deposed a national leader in Latin America, using Greg Grandin’s tally in his book Empire’s Workshop. Donald Trump and his entourage of ridiculous thugs, having fried their synapses with the thrill of conquest, are now threatening to overthrow, invade or destabilize Cuba, Iran, Mexico, and Denmark. Simultaneously, the regime is terrorizing the country’s interior with squadrons of jumped-up prison guards given explicitly racist marching orders by no less a legal authority than associate justice Brett Kavanaugh. These goons have occupied Minneapolis with such overwhelming force that a coalition of unions in the state have announced a strike beginning a week from Friday in the wake of the brutal, public murder of Renee Good.

The towering history of American imperial expansion has collapsed and crushed the country's own populace under the wreckage. Now its leaders are trying to simply build more on top of it. 

The initial assault on Minneapolis went after immigrants from Somalia, a country we spent all of last year mercilessly bombing. [The most recent U.S. drone strike on Somalia, now entering its 20th year of being a War on Terror battlefield, came on Monday. It's already the eighth announced airstrike on Somalia of 2026, and the first was a fusillade that lasted three days—Spencer] Now, though, federal militants are going door to door in the city asking white-presenting people to rat out neighbors who look Asian in a presumptive effort to target the Hmong community. The Hmong community in Minneapolis only exists in the first place because so many Hmong had to flee Vietnam after the U.S. lost its war there, which used Hmong communities as local proxies. On Long Island, ICE disappears legal residents, including one man who works for the City Council, snapping him up at an immigration hearing for no reason other than that he’s Venezuelan. Venezuelan immigrants are exported to El Salvador. Nicaraguan immigrants are carted off to Cuba. The Oglala Sioux President Frank Star Comes Out revealed this week that ICE has detained three or perhaps four of his tribespeople—all of whom are entirely outside ICE jurisdiction—and said ICE would not reveal more than their first names unless the tribe agreed to enter an "immigration enforcement agreement" with the agency. "This is not a misunderstanding or an enforcement discretion issue," Star Comes Out said. "This is a treaty violation." 

 "The war has always been coming home," writes Grandin, "at least since Andrew Jackson's assault on the Creeks in 1814."

But even in America, even for ICE, this is disorienting. We have detained the sitting president of another country in the same prison as Luigi Mangione and the guy who shot Jam Master Jay. We have sicced a rabid paramilitary operating under the color of federal law on millions of people trying to go about their lives in Minneapolis and Chicago and Los Angeles, purely for the purpose of inflicting terror. And why? Why destroy immigrants, on whom the country’s entire economy unequivocally depends, just so that frightened right-wingers addicted to cable news and talk radio can have their slop? In Minneapolis it’s because a man who is already in prison burned down a police station six years ago, and the American right decided that the whole city was enemy territory, and who do you fight in enemy territory? Foreigners, of course. The occupations of Chicago and Los Angeles are expressions of the same sort of grudge; they came first because they were personal. Trump hates Chicago for producing Obama and Stephen Miller hates Southern California for producing Stephen Miller. 

AS A PRIVATE JOKE I categorize each article we publish about politics here as either “The War Abroad” or “The War at Home.” I’ve always loved that second phrase, which was first intended to ennoble Americans sacrificing their material comforts to help supply the nation’s military as it joined the Allies in World War II. We’re hardly the first guys to use it ironically, but the irony, at least here at FOREVER WARS, is in part that these theaters of war are not actually separate at all. Americans like to think of themselves as living on the moon or in Narnia; there is America, and there is The Rest of the World. But of course America is in the world, and the world comes to America, especially when America has smashed some delicate part of it and there is nowhere else to go. And we thank them for it by killing them again, a sort of historical double-tap strike meant to wipe out any survivors. [See this 2022 essay, "What America Does Abroad Is What America Does At Home"—Spencer] 

It’s very boring at this late stage to declare that this is all illegal, immoral, the work of people animated exclusively by race hate and misogyny, but it is such a clear, overriding fact that repeating it becomes a compulsion, like a tic. The Secretary of Defense appears to have committed a war crime simply called “perfidy” in the course of his serial killings of Latin American fishermen in the Caribbean. [Perfidy is the main charge leveled at Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the military commissions over the U.S.S. Cole bombing from 2000. I once heard a military lawyer discuss its solemn importance when I pointed out that bombing an enemy naval destroyer is an act of war and not terrorism—Spencer ] The extent of the wickedness remains overwhelming, despite its ubiquity. There’s no getting used to this.

Thus I find myself asking questions I don’t want answered. In Argentina, leftists fought back against exactly this kind of state-sponsored oppression—sponsored, indeed, by the same state—with pure terrorism. They kidnapped corporate executives who were despoiling their country and ransomed them from their wealthy families to fund bombing campaigns, raids on military bases, and assassinations. Peaceful resistance, too, moved the country toward the restoration of democracy, but of course the question is not which kind of resistance we would prefer, only how much it will take. Stephen Miller’s brownshirts are shooting people in the face, using both less-lethal ordnance like pepper balls and plain old bullets, and reports say they brag about it when confronted. 

Trump, meanwhile, is trying to empire-build in Iran, threatening to bomb it again before praising its teetering regime for not executing protesters there. In the same breath, he's threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minneapolis and tries to get the Department of Justice to investigate the widow of an ICE victim who died protesting him. In the fantasies of our empire, forever innocent, forever brutal, fascist prison guards throw Rebecca Good into a cell next to Ayatollah Khamanei. 

Every moment that ordinary people permit this tyrannical regime to persist is a moment closer to that dream coming true. I’ve often tried to comfort myself with my own selfish fantasy of our flawed society’s ironic collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, making the way clear for something better. But of course it won’t. There is no “late capitalism,” there is no “late empire;” the expansion and the collapse are the same thing. There's just us. If we want to put an end to that cycle, we have work to do.

SPENCER HERE. I don't want to step on Sam's excellent piece, but I do want to highlight some important developments. 

New York Attorney General Letitia James forced the disbandment of operations of the fascist Jewish group Betar—and before you ask: yes, they collaborate with ICE—who under penalty of fine and potential criminal prosecution will no longer be able to menace pro-Palestinian demonstrators and other supporters in New York state. The head of Betar in the state, the representative who had to sign James' agreement, was a major fundraiser for Rep. Richie Torres, who represents AIPAC and pretends to represent the Bronx. Torres, in June, voted for a resolution that "expresses gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland." Now he's pushing a bill to absurdly make ICE wear QR codes that you can try to scan while getting the shit kicked out of you in the pursuit of obtaining their identity.

FOREVER WARS friend Esfandyar Batmanghelidj wrote a piece in 2023 on the effect of U.S. sanctions on the Iranian public that seems worth revisiting now that mass economic immiseration was the spark that may send the entire Islamic Republic up in flames. Discussing sanctions relief seems to miss the moment in Iran, so I don't want to derail focus on both Iranians' struggle for freedom and the exploitation of that struggle by Israel and the United States. But I'll want to write something in the future about economic besiegement, and I note that Venezuela is still under sanctions, intended as leverage over the post-Maduro government, so that might be what any post-Islamic Republic Iran is in for, should we really be at that point. 

FOREVER WARS wrote on Monday about ICE transitioning into a right-wing death squad. Detailing that transition is Ken Klippenstein, who on Wednesday revealed ICE operations that concern "gathering intelligence in support of Trump’s war on cartels—as well as on Antifa, on the radical left, and those who are 'anti-American,' and anyone else they consider terrorists." Operation ABRACADABRA [Yeah I had to double-check that that one was real, too—Sam] seeks to manufacture information tying migrants to terrorism: "Tying every individual who crosses the border illegally to a Foreign Terrorist Organization, a Transnational Criminal Organization, and/or utilizing the intelligence to develop targets," per a briefing slide Ken obtained. 

Similarly, Joseph Cox at 404 Media today reveals ELITE, or Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement, a Palantir mapping tool for ICE using data taken from Health and Human Services to yield a display of potential migrants overlaid on a map of an area, complete with profile information and an estimated likelihood of their presence. When I revealed in 2020 that Palantir had a contract with HHS for coronavirus tracking, I noted that Palantir also worked with ICE, but clearly my imagination was not dystopically expansive enough.   

"ICE can also use ELITE to look up people based on an unique identifier, such as their Alien Number, name, or date of birth," Cox reports. "ELITE also lets ICE do this in bulk, selecting up to 50 people at once, according to the guide." While I gathered from the top of Cox's report that ELITE may still be under final construction, he reports that it's already been put to use in Oregon and has been described in officer testimony.