Democratic Party Debate Sidetracks Issues of U.S. Interventionism

In last night’s Democratic Party debate, the hosts of CNN devoted just minutes to the issue of foreign policy. Just when Elizabeth Warren was explaining why she would renounce the threat of using nuclear weapons for preemptive purposes, one of the CNN moderators insisted on moving on to another issue, leaving her with her words in her mouth. This is part of a well-established pattern. Open the pages of liberal magazines and you will see very little in the way of articles on foreign issues, other than human rights and perhaps issues related to ecology. A few weeks ago, I participated in a discussion in Vermont of friends of Monthly Review who discussed the latest MR issue on the topic of imperialism in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Harry Magdoff’s “The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy.” Various writers on the left including (surprisingly) David Harvey has declared imperialism to be a non-issue in the 21^st century age of globalization. Thus writers across the political spectrum play down the topic of  U.S. world-wide domination. As last night’s Democratic Party debate demonstrated, it is much more kosha to talk of universal health, free college tuition and the $15 dollar minimum wage, than to raise issues related to U.S. interventionism and domination and the military-industrial complex. The reason can be reduced to the following: super-profits, the bedrock of imperialism, are essential to the maintenance and survival of the capitalist system.  

https://monthlyreview.org/2019/07/01/mr-071-03-2019-07_0/