It’s time for Biden to go. His mind has already gone. He is absent, his administration delinquent. That’s how the last article here ended and on the face of it, from the perspective of democratic politics it might look like we have a lame duck presidency. Except that his inability or unwillingness to take control of the situation in Gaza and stop the war, despite the mounting costs that the various allied constituencies of the Axis of Resistance are relentlessly imposing on Israel and American forces, makes him the candidate of empire. That’s what his team is betting will work.

Biden is losing considerable support across the traditional constituencies of the Democratic Party. He faces a rising tide of youth antipathy against Zionism. He has lost the Arab vote crucial in the swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin, where delegates won’t meet with campaign managers. The large pro-Palestinian sentiment focused on the younger segments of the American population has, according to the most recent polls, morphed into a more general anti-war movement that threatens to turn into something akin to the Vietnam War protests.

Netanyahu’s bullying has made Biden look weak. His doddering frame haltingly crossing television screens that are carrying pictures of terrible events in the Middle East is a bizarre sight. It sears the image of a president not in control into voters’ minds. But the White House’s Chief Adolescent Jake Sullivan rules ok, making all the decisions Biden seems not to be able to make, and that Lloyd Austin over at the Defense department resolutely refuses to make.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s fateful decision on 26 January destroyed Israel’s hegemonic narrative, just as the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of 7 October destroyed Israel’s security and intelligence reputation, and just as the resistance by the Qassam Brigades and the Quds Brigades has destroyed the myth of Israel’s military prowess. Even as the 121^st day of the war dawns, Netanyahu carries out one final desperate move against the indomitable Gazans, in the south at the Rafah crossing, to achieve some goal or other that might justify Israel continuing in the vanguard of empire. The pressure on the Egyptian government to get out of the way is ironic as the régime is itself the product of a coup engineered by the empire (but see postcript below*). The other strange fact is that in Rafah, as circumstances would have it, Israeli soldiers will meet a brigade of Qassam (and PFLP) fighters that have, as yet, not seen much action.

The empire’s unilateral ‘rules based order’: The empire brushes off the ICJ decision with derision. White House spokesman John Kirby tells us (scratching his neck! – how pictures can tell a story!), that South Africa’s case is ‘meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis and fact whatsoever.’ His Master’s Voice in the United Kingdom angles for a pat on the head by calling the case ‘a horrific irony and totally unjustified.’ The government of Namibia, having received a formal apology together with reparations for the German genocide in 1904-8, stated its total disbelief that Germany would actually seek to contest the ICJ decision. The following week, Germany retracted. Indeed, the entire Global South has risen up against Israel and the empire. Separate cases have been raised by South Africa, Mexico and Chile, Türkiye, and Indonesia against Israel’s actions, while South Africa’s case was endorsed by other Latin American countries (Brazil, Bolivia, Columbia, Venezuela) as well as the countries of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and 55 others).

The ICJ had ordered Israel ‘to take all possible measures to prevent genocidal acts, to prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide, and to take immediate and effective steps to ensure the provision of basic services and humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza.’ Israel, however, predictably does the exact opposite, and has killed nearly 900 Palestinians since the ICJ order. Although mainstream Western media does its best to stifle news of the ICJ decision, this is getting increasingly difficult. As the Palestinian cause morphs into something on the scale of the Vietnam protests, it merges with general popular discontent against the neoliberal disorder and becomes the flagship cause.

Under the ICJ’s ‘provisional measures,’ not only does the respondent state (Israel) ‘need to comply with the binding orders. The erga omnes nature of the obligation to prevent genocide, means all states ‘must refrain from any acts that might aid and assist’ contravention of article 3c of the Genocide Convention. We see officers at the very centre of the bureaucracies of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union rebelling against the empire’s crass delinquency, over the potentially serious legal consequences for their states in the form of reparations.

Going further, we find the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Finland, Canada and Australia deciding in one fell swoop to defund UNRWA and their work for Palestinian refugees, based on as yet unproven allegations by Israel (that ‘beacon of truth’) about 12 UNRWA employees who might have taken part in the 7 October events. This imposes a completely separate burden on those defunding countries of having violated Genocide Convention article 2(c) by: ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group [Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…’. [N.B. the fact that the EU, Sweden, Norway, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Kuwait, Qatar are still on board with UNRWA actually puts the defunding countries in an even more precarious legal position].

The future will be bright at least for human rights lawyers (and their children, and their children’s children).

The most important aspect of the 26 January ICJ ruling, however, is the precedent that has been set in virtue of the fact that none of the 153 signatories to the Genocide Convention disagreed with a ruling, on exactly the same basis for exactly the same subject matter, in the Gambia vs. Myanmar case regarding the Rohingya people. It is for this specific reason that the Ugandan government rejected the Ugandan’s judge’s dissenting vote in South Africa vs. Israel. Back in Washington, Biden’s own staff rebel against their president’s truancy.

But even as the empire sees itself as above the law – a sort of Gulliver in Lilliput – the Lilliputians acting in concert can tie it down. In appearing to support Israel in this case, Biden is going against South Africa. This is losing him considerable support across the board among black voters. We are in déjà vu territory here. It was the black vote in America, it has to be remembered, that ended apartheid, and that forced British PM Margaret Thatcher to renounce her claim that the African National Congress (ANC) was, in her words, a ‘typical terrorist organisation.’

Meanwhile Trump is advancing in leaps and bounds in the race for Republican nominee. The contrast with Biden could not be more stark. Trump is fighting and winning against the Republican Party establishment, leaving only a shrill and brittle Nikki Haley vying with him for the South Carolina primary on 24 February. Biden, on the other hand, is the Democratic Party establishment candidate, running against candidates (Marianne Williamson and Dean Philips) that are not in the least bit a threat. If Robert Kennedy Jr. had been allowed to run as a Democrat, Biden would have had serious competition.

The Trump factor and the Middle East: In the Middle East, all bets are on Trump coming to power. Netanyahu is putting his foot on the brake and continuing the war to keep himself in power until he hopes Trump comes to power, when he thinks Israel will become a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ again.

Saudi Arabia is, on the other hand, rushing ahead (somewhat indecorously) with its ‘normalisation’ with Israel ahead of a Trump victory, on the basis that it is more assured to achieving its maximalist terms with an embattled Biden administration in the current unusual circumstances than with a future Trump. Saudi FM Faisal Farhan wants (1) a pact committing the United States to come to its defence if it is ever attacked (more on which in the section on Saudi Arabia below), (2) an agreement on the implementation of a full-scale nuclear power programme, and (3) a Palestinian state. To give Saudi Arabia its due it has always stuck with its 2002 (Beirut) Arab Peace Initiative and continues to do so. The demand for the Palestinian state, however, is downgraded from ‘practical steps to be taken’ to ‘political commitment’, to allow a now hapless Blinken room to manoeuvre with Netanyahu on his fifth visit since 7 October.

But the idea of Netanyahu agreeing for Israel to make a ‘political commitment’ to a Palestinian state seems not to be working. Nevertheless, all kinds of unlikely politicians have been wheeled out to make positive noises about a two state solution in order to ‘set the scene’ for Blinken’s meetings with Netanyahu. Politicians said to be in the ‘Arabist’ (presumably in contrast to the Zionist) tradition of the British Foreign Office have been brought out of retirement in order to push forward (at least) the idea of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian Authority people (Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah & Co) are sitting in Ramallah doing and saying absolutely nothing (except drawing down salaries from the EU), hoping the ‘Arabist’ David Cameron will join Saudi Arabia in throwing the mantle of leadership on their shoulders. In a weird sense, Netanyahu will be doing the Palestinians a favour if he refuses to consider the idea. There still remains the chance that Gaza’s indomitable spirit, buoyed by international protest, maintains Palestinian independence (but see the second poscript below**).

The Saudi nuclear programme will probably be agreed in principle by the US, even if some controversial aspects are rejected by Congress. Saudi Arabia going completely Chinese is unthinkable for the empire. Arab oil surpluses and Chinese manufacturing surpluses slowly disappearing into each other in a frenzy of productive investment is the ultimate nightmare for a United States with a serious deficit and with a shaky banking system that is finding it harder and harder to keep an unproductive economy going with a military-industrial complex now running a budget close to $1trillion.

Wherever the Saudi gambit is going (on which more below), Netanyahu may be betting on the wrong horse, and there are two aspects to this problem. To begin with, Trump maybe winning against the Republican Party establishment. However, the establishment or the ‘deep state’, whatever you call it – the legacy Clinton-Obama security state, with its complement of neocons – is going to try everything to keep him out of power. The 2024 elections are going kinetic and the limits of bad behaviour are going to be tested. Anything is possible.

The second thing is that if Trump survives and does comes to power, he will most likely have a different focus. He will face a full-on war on the domestic front with the establishment, one that will replicate Russiagate or worse and narrow his room for manoeuvre. Should he prioritise the goal of winning a second term this time round, as would be natural, the one thing that would guarantee his recurring popularity is to fulfil on his promise to end the ‘forever wars,’ assuaging thus the public’s elemental hatred of the military-industrial complex. Atlanticists are already panicking, predicting an isolationist president and publishing ‘how to survive Trump’ manuals. The domestic focus in fact becomes inevitable if Trump tries to prevent or counter a new Russiagate. He will have to clean out the Augean stables properly this time. This means doing the hard work of replacing staff in all the main departments of state, at multiple grade levels. He inherits a neocon staff at his peril.

But what about the close family relationship between Netanyahu and Jared Kusher, Trump’s son-in-law. Will Israel be a special case?…

What is clear is that the Ukraine War is taking a back-seat to a Middle East with an emboldened Axis of Resistance. The era of Kushner as US Middle East envoy and his ‘Deal of Century,’ was a time of peace, albeit that this was deceptive (7 October was a mere blueprint deep underground in Gaza). Savage war, ICJ rulings and a new protest movement disenchanted with the Democrats over Middle Eastern policy since then, means that ending wars will inevitably be about ending wars in the Middle East. Furthermore, the current Gaza War has stymied the ‘pivot to Asia.’ Focusing on China and re-empowering the American economy, will come naturally to Trump who promoted exactly the same thing in his Art of the Deal in response to Japanese economic hegemony in the 1980s.

Blinken’s unholy mess: One person that Trump should want to keep on board if he comes to power, if he can, is anti-neocon Blinken-critic and CIA Director William Burns. Burns is, after all, setting out his stall for the future in a new Foreign Affairs article, perhaps intended for a re-elected Biden, perhaps not. Burns was no run of the mill US State Department official in his former guise. At the 2008 NATO summit in Budapest, he was one of the few members of the US delegation to strongly warn against the decision of George W. Bush to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. Aside from the wisdom he dispenses with imperial condescension in his article, Burns warns about the Middle East that “I have spent much of the last four decades working in and on the Middle East, and I have rarely seen it more tangled or explosive.”

Burns (it appears) expressed his outrage to Biden about the inflammatory rhetoric Blinken used on the first visit by any American official to Israel after 7 October. After Blinken said ‘I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but as Jew,’ he went on quite unnecessarily to outline his family’s relationship to the events of the Holocaust in Germany. That would have been the time to calm things down, instead of lighting the match that sent Israel down its inchoate and destructive path and its pursuit of goals that have been shown to be impossible to fulfil, whether the defeat of Hamas through a ground operation or the ethnic cleansing of Gazans.

Burns makes his view clear in the article that this Gazan War has put the United States in an impossible position in the Middle East: ‘The Iranian regime has been emboldened by the crisis and seems ready to fight to its last regional proxy, all while expanding its nuclear program and enabling Russian aggression.’ Note in that regard that on January 15, Russian FM Sergei Lavrov held a conversation with Iran’s FM Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in which he announced (trans.) “coordination at all levels, emphasizing the unwavering mutual commitment to the fundamental principles of Russian-Iranian relations, including unconditional respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and other principles of the UN Charter, which will be confirmed in the upcoming ‘big’  interstate agreement between the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran.” After Iran had been assured of this upcoming mutual defence pact with Russia, it attacked American and Israeli interests in Erbil (video: destroying Mossad HQ @ 1.30mins, and US Consulate @ 1.47mins). The property of an oil-trader working for Mossad (Peshraw Dizayee) was also destroyed. It is also obvious that the current situation is incentivising Iran to complete a nuclear weapon.

To see also the problem Israel has created for itself as Iran prepares, in Burns’ words, ‘to fight to its last regional proxy,’ it is worth looking at a map of UNWRA Palestinian refugee camps.

In the map above, subject to creative commons, and sourced from Al-Jazeera, we can see that over the years, the Israelis have displaced almost 6 million Palestinians, who now live in camps surrounding them. Of 2.5m Gazans, some 1.45m were refugees even before the current debacle; of 2.9m West Bankers some 850,000 are refugees; of Jordan’s 11m population, 2.2m are Palestinians who became refugees in 1967. Original 1948 refugees have been integrated and make up a sizeable proportion of the Jordanian population. There are, furthermore, 475,000 refugees in Lebanon and 560,000 in Syria. The Palestinian citizens of Israel (second class citizens in a self-professed Jewish state) are 1.8m. These are all 2018 figures.

So there are some 18m Palestinians in and around Israel who have been put on notice, in no uncertain terms, that there exists an insane fascist Israeli régime that seeks to destroy them as a matter of policy. This policy, furthermore, is not limited to occupied Palestine. The Israeli régime also wants to destroy Hezbollah, which is a political party with a military wing in Lebanon that represents 1.8m of the total population there of 5.5m. These populations and those of Syria and Iraq are all turning to Iran to equip and train organising fighting groups like the Qassam brigades and Hezbollah to prepare for what they see as an inevitable confrontation with the United States and Israel. With the Houthis controlling Bab el-Mandab and Iran controlling the straits of Hormuz, it is not difficult to see Burn’s concern that the idiotic and precipitate action taken in this Gaza War has put the United States in an impossible position, especially since Egypt will ensure that the Gazan population stays in place. Egypt, somewhat like Israel, but in a different capacity (the job of the current Cairo régime is to protect Israel from the Egyptian population), is one of the tentacles of the military-industrial complex. The Egyptian leadership is resolute about its interests being taken into account..

The security of Saudi Arabia and the legitimacy of its régime: The decision of Salman bin Abdelaziz al-Saud and his son Mohamed bin Salman not only to seize power but to marginalise the rest of royal family has led to a radical change in the exercise of power in the kingdom at all levels. A number of mega-projects in the areas of clean energy, industry, and tourism together called Vision 2030 are diversifying Saudi Arabia away from oil, and this is accompanied by a change in the system of rule from one based on tribal consent and patronage, to one based on an autocratic bureaucracy, leaving the ruler at the head of the system politically exposed. The eight year war in Yemen was a political tool that enabled Salman bin Abdelaziz al-Saud, his son Mohamed (‘MBS’) and their advisers to effect their shock transformation of the power structure in the desert kingdom.

The war had to stop, however, and an accommodation reached with Ansar Allah (the Houthis) in order to stop the haemorrhaging of money and to protect the Vision 2030 mega-projects as they were being built, from attack. Nothing in this world is going to induce the Saudi régime into restarting the war. They instigated the China brokered peace deal with Iran, and obtained a commitment from Iran that the Iranians would no longer supply arms to Yemen. This has led to a radical departure in regional relations that earlier articles on this site called the era of the New Diplomacy.

But as Saudi Arabia transitions from tribal monarchy to autocracy it seeks popular support through a policy of supplying ‘bread and circuses’ to its public. While the new régime embarks on a process of cultural re-education, it still needs to hold down the job of the guardianship of the Two Holy Mosques at Mecca and Medina and hosting millions of pilgrims every year. But the Wahhabi clerical establishment has been ruthlessly muzzled and supressed in the cause of opening up, leaving a gaping hole where the country’s religious establishment used to be, and more generally also leaving a population of 35m navigating unchartered religious-cultural waters. Modernity in Saudi Arabia until the 2010s had so far been merely brick-deep and in Saudi society’s future journey, anything could happen.

This internal problem is thus cause of an extreme sense of insecurity for a régime that now feels it needs (perhaps not expressed in such terms exactly) – protection essentially from its own people, especially those in the armed forces. This clearly has to be supplied by a foreign power. Putin’s recent visit to Mohamed bin Salman suggests he made a bid to fulfil this role, at least partly. However, Saudi’s vast stock of weapons is of American manufacture, as a result of agreements under which a proportion of its oil revenues are held in escrow and disbursed by approval of the US government. This, and the desert kingdom’s investment in US Treasury bonds, were negotiated between 9 – 13 July 1974 in Jeddah by King Faisal bin Abdelaziz’s advisers, and the American team comprising Treasury Secretary William Simon and his deputy, Gerry Parsky. The visit had been prompted by the Saudi oil embargo and the quadrupling of oil prices in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. If a consensual agreement hadn’t been reached in that meeting, and the Americans had resorted to military means, then perhaps Saudis today would be in the unfortunate position of Iraqis, whose oil revenues are held in escrow in their totality.

“Normalising” with Israel is seen by Saudi Arabia as a price to be paid for a defence pact with the US. But since the inception of the idea, Saudi leaders have agonised over the Palestinian statehood that they need to maintain the legitimacy of the régime. As mentioned above Saudis have resolutely stuck to their 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. But until now Israel’s refusal to countenance Palestinian statehood meant the normalisation deal stalled. So a large part of the ‘indecorous’ haste in seeking to close a normalisation deal now, clearly comes from the fact that the Saudis perceive a window as having opened in the current crisis for getting something done on this score.

A window for Palestinian statehood (in whatever form) and ‘normalisation’ may have opened, but there remains a serious problem, one that Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, leader of Ansar Allah, addressed in an unusually long speech on 1 February. He described the killing, the maiming, the sickness, the hunger, the thirst and the pain of everyday life in Gaza, as well as specific experiences of women and children under siege. He stressed the baleful motivations of Israelis in their genocidal rampage and talked about the ICJ ruling, asking the question: how could anyone with Islamic morals possibly countenance “normalising” with Israel. Al-Houthi, who is an influential religious leader, went on to decry the decline of morals amongst Arabs. These ideas – not Iran’s weapons – will pose the greatest challenge to the Saudi régime in the coming future.

In this new awakened post- 7 October Middle East, it hard to see the kind of slum-landlord brand of foreign policy represented by Jared Kushner making a return, even if he were a part of a new Trump presidency, which appears doubtful.  

What is and what to do about “Pentagon capitalism”

The United States as an empire is organised around a military-industrial complex of companies that use global resources to make the largest profits in the world by far. Nevertheless, the country’s trade is deficitary because those companies make more of their products abroad than they do in the United States and its federal government is in deficit because it doesn’t raise enough taxes on those companies (or the individuals within the country) to pay for its expenses on its military and social security and borrows abroad to plug the gap. The representatives of Americans in Congress are incentivised, one to minimise taxes because they know that their country can borrow as much as it likes abroad with impunity, and two to channel as much money into the military industrial complex*** as possible because that allows them to get re-elected. Countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia (as above) are the source of much of its company profits (in sectors like Big Oil, the weapons manufacturers, Big Tech), as well as the source of federal government borrowings, because those Arab countries have trade surpluses. [*** See why Pentagon capitalism is a better term than the usual ‘military industrial complex’ in the post-script below]

American state and defence officials, soldiers and contractors abroad in places like the Middle East are cogs in a brute machine with a defence budget that has climbed over the years to reach $1trillion. It is, and has been ever since the Vietnam War, the central part US federal budget deficits. It is in fact roughly equal to both the federal budget deficit and the whole country’s current account deficit in its balance of payments, and as such it is the main driver of the neoliberal order’s disequilibria. Seymour Melman, in his book Pentagon Capitalism, wrote about how the United States federal government has, since the end of the Second World War, spent more than half of its total discretionary budget on the military, to the detriment of investment in the country’s infrastructure, education and health. The congressional representatives whose votes essentially determine this outcome act in this way because they get the money and support to be re-elected to office. The fact that the companies that form the military industrial complex spread the huge contracts they are given by the Defense department across every single congressional constituency in the country, means they ensure that military or defence appropriations always get an overwhelming majority of votes.

When congressional representatives justify voting for any military expenditure package, they always cite ‘jobs’ as their rationale. And yet this rationale has been roundly ridiculed in research carried out by Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier, who calculated the number of jobs created by investment across most industries, ranging from defence to health care, renewable energy and education. They concluded that education came in first by a wide margin producing 26,700 jobs for every $1billion of investment, followed by health care with 17,200, whilst defence came last with 11,200 jobs. Andrew Cockburn, in his book Spoils of War, gives a striking example in which even supposedly progressive Democrats use the ‘jobs’ argument for military spending even when it violates their supposed political principles. Bernie Sanders supported the F-35 being stationed in Vermont at Burlington International Airport on the ground of ‘job creation,’ even though it is at least four times noisier than the F-16s it replaces, meaning that the surrounding neighbourhood (by the Air Force’s own criteria) will be rendered unfit for residential use, so trapping some 7,000 people in homes that will become virtually worthless. Why is this happening? What is the secret?

The basic reason is that the US Congress, rather than being a parliament for the people of America is actually tied into ‘Pentagon Capitalism,’ which is a system for generating and guaranteeing huge profits managed by the state to be distributed to a special class of firms and executives that dominate the American economy. When the banks were bailed out in 2008 after the Great Financial Crash they caused without the slightest penalty, everyone was surprised. But they shouldn’t have been. This is how the system has always worked. It goes completely against the (mythical) American narrative of “free competition” and “capitalism.” Where free competition and capitalism are indeed ideas that help generate productivity and economic well-being across the board, the hidden bureaucratic statism that actually takes its place produces the dystopian economy and society that generates costs that everybody else has to bear and that we know all too well. The fact that the central product in the system is military equipment is itself predicated on destruction rather than creation.

At the time President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American public about the influence of the military industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address, it was still operating as a loose collection of firms competing on capitalist principles for government contracts. During the John F. Kennedy administration, however, Robert McNamara was hired as Secretary of Defense from the Ford Motor Co. to centralise decision-making under civilian control and away from armed forces commanders. This created a massive state-management system that controlled a vast array of the nation’s largest industrial enterprises. The main consequence was the change in managerial motives from capitalist profit-seeking to bureaucratic power-seeking, creating a culture of production without reference to costings and productivity. Contractors in the US defence sector charge what they want, and regularly pass on cost overruns as part of the terms of business. This eroded the competitiveness of American industry in the face of foreign competition and made them dependent on the state.

This enormous industrial machine became a guaranteed money spinner for a wide array of companies whose collective financial reference was not corporate profit as such, because profits simply came from whatever share of the US GDP Congress would give them on a plate. The irony was that as expenditure grew the armed forces shrank and its equipment became older. The cost of the ever-more complex weapons that the military insisted on buying as part of their bureaucratic power-seeking grew many times faster than the overall defence budget. In consequence, planes, ships and tanks were never replaced on a one-to-one basis, and the armed forces got smaller and older. Planes, for instance, were kept in service for longer periods of time and were maintained in poor states of repair owing to their increasing complexity. The impressive size of the American military budget compared with the budgets of adversaries such as China and Russia thus does not necessarily translate into a concomitant strike or defence superiority.

Meanwhile military budgets never fell because of the hold of Pentagon Capitalism over Congress. The secret that drives the likes of even Sanders to vote for the military budget is that it is a system of welfare that millions of Americans depend on, from which the country’s élites cream off a considerable percentage (both licit and illicit). It is a system in which military expenditure doesn’t arise because a war has to be fought, but in which wars arise because military expenditure has to be voted on to keep the American way of life going.

To be absolutely clear, the companies involved are not just the well-known weapons specialists, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop-Grumman but also conglomerates like Boeing, General Electric, and General Dynamics. Big Tech are in there with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts. Indeed Amazon supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and FBI. Jeff Bezos would never have been able to buy the Washington Post if he wasn’t close specifically with the managers of America’s security state. Elon Musk wouldn’t be where he is without the lucrative contracts Space X has with NASA, or the subsidies that the government gave to launch Tesla at its inception. But even much before that, as Dennis Hayes explains in his book Behind the Silicon Curtain, it would be a Pentagon rescue plan for the American electronics industry whose executives were desperately seeking help to fight back against Japanese tech dominance in the 1980s that launched Big Tech and Silicon Valley, and brought about the new products that gave us the Digital Age. Pentagon Capitalism is an oxymoron, it is about a state planned economy couched deceptively as private enterprise.

The modern revolution in warfare and its consequences: Ironically, it was the application of digital technology, discussed in a previous article on this site, that William Perry pioneered when he was Undersecretary of Defense for R & D under Carter (1977-1981), devising weapons fitted with microchips and guided by digital technology to give American weapons a qualitative advantage over Soviet weapons that produced much of the research that went with Pentagon money in its 1980s rescue package. The only problem was that the bureaucratic power-seeking motive of Pentagon Capitalism meant that the deconstructive logic inherent to digital technology was not used to simplify things, but rather to create more and more complex weapons and weapons systems. As everybody knows who works in large companies, devising a fully integrated network as opposed to linking standalone PCs to a communication network is very expensive and is always riddled with problems. The F35 fighter and the B21 bomber are examples of trillion dollar projects of this type that the Pentagon has developed with its suppliers which deliver weapons systems that quickly become the problem rather than the solution in warfare.

But the Ukraine War has shown how digital technology has been used to develop small, lethal all-seeing but almost invisible drones at low cost to revolutionise warfare. Land, air, sea, and under water drones have redefined a new full spectrum drone warfare in which large-scale engagements with conventional equipment are doomed to fail against a more dispersed enemy with an effective command and control with communications systems that can bring together many far-flung units onto a particular target on a timely basis in coordination with ‘effects’ (electronic warfare, setting of fires, and psychological and hybrid action). These are lessons now learned by Hamas using drones to strike observation towers thus to facilitate its armed incursions during the 7 October al-Aqsa operation, by Hezbollah to disable the Israeli signals and radar framework in Galilee in the current war, and by Ansar Allah with their persistent attacks on shipping in the Red and Arabian seas.

This rapid, light-footed, cheaply funded but nevertheless lethal form of warfare will transform the capabilities of fighting groups in the Middle East. This contrasts sharply with the ponderous, large-scale static style of American ground operations using fixed military bases and with the large-scale naval units such as aircraft carriers and destroyers used in marine operations that now become better targets than they are weapons. If we think about the discussion above on the expansion and military re-education of fighting groups it is difficult to see how American hard power will be able to impose its will in the Middle East in the coming future. What Hamas has also shown, besides the lethal effectiveness of its Yassin 105 anti-armour tandem-charge missile (main picture), made cheaply from commercially available piping but capable of annihilating multi-million dollar tanks, is the importance of underground warfare. This strategy originally spread to Gaza from North Korea, but sophisticated tunnel systems have become, on a massive scale, the standard countermeasure to American air dominance in Iran and China.

In fact, the focus of American and NATO armies on air dominance had previously caused the Soviet Union to focus its research on air defence, ultimately producing systems like the S-300, which have recently been developed in Russia into the S-400 and S-500 systems which are able to address multiple targets over air spaces of hundreds of square kms. However, Russia’s expertise in missile technology has also resulted in the development of hypersonics. The development of hypersonic missiles have made radar systems and anti-ballistic missile systems like the US Patriot Missile and the Israeli Iron Dome redundant, and while China and Iran also have them, America doesn’t. To date the Pentagon hasn’t officially confirmed Russia’s destruction of Patriot systems deployed in Ukraine with Kh-47 Kinzhal hypersonic missiles. What is more, Hezbollah has also developed a missile (the Kornet) that, on the same principle, flies fast enough to evade anti-ballistic missile systems (i.e. the Iron Dome). Hezbollah surprised Israel when it repeatedly used this weapon to destroy the regionally-important Meron signals base on Mount Jarmaq in occupied Palestine.

The United States enlarged NATO in the 2000s to enable to improve the returns on Pentagon Capitalism by selling weapons to captive audiences. The entire premise of all the weapons systems that have thus been sold is in serious doubt. Not only will the Axis of Resistance be able to resist and expel American forces from large swathes of the Middle East (in those places where they are not wanted), but the economic basis of Pentagon Capitalism will increasingly come under pressure, thus severely shaking the substructure of the neoliberal world disorder even as its financial superstructure has been, and is still being shaken.

*P.S. 5 February 2024

Hamas’ civil administration is gradually coming out of the tunnels to manage the strip and to start paying the salaries of state employees. Hamas successfully tunnelling into Egypt to get supplies and money is what is fuelling Netanyahu’s (hopeless) attempt to control the Philadelphia corridor. The  one thing you can rely on in Egypt is the rampant corruption amongst state employees which has kept Gaza alive all these years.

**P.P.S. 6 February 2024

One further thought: should Netanyahu survive this crisis to remain in power, the divide and rule tactics he uses amongst Israelis as he does amongst Palestinians, will contribute to Hamas’ continuance.

***P.P.P.S. 27 March 2024

The term “military-industrial complex” suggests that there are a separate groups of companies in weapons manufacture. Some of the large defence manufacturers, however, are producers of a wide array of other industrial products, while most of them are integrated within the general “corporate community” through director interlocks. Generally speaking, the defence budget rises and falls as a percentage of GDP in relation to crises and foreign policy threats (Oatley, Political Economy of American Hegemony 2015) and does not rise steadily as a percentage of GDP. The corporate community should be thought of as a military-industrial complex (Domhoff, Who Rules America?, 2022)

[Ref: Prt 13 Post-Script 20; info@globalshiffft.com; © 2023]