Photo by TROY ALLEN

Last week marked a quarter century since September 11, 2001. The catastrophic attacks on the United States precipitated what the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad called in an eponymous essay and book, “the imperialism of our time.” In his 2004 essay, he sought to map the political juncture following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when unchecked U.S. power birthed George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.” Rather than being ensnared in inter-imperialist rivalries, as in earlier epochs, the imperialism of the twenty-first century was defined by the overwhelming gravity of a single hegemon: the United States.

That pivotal moment ushered in the rise of the United States as a truly global, imperial state—unrivaled, unrestrained, and structurally compelled to extend its reach. What set this empire apart from its predecessors was its structural demand: securing the planetary movement of capital and commodities, while extracting super-profits through global supply chains, required a military machine capable of policing the entire globe. The researchers at The Tricontinental Institute term this stage “hyper-imperialism”—an updated version of Lenin’s 1916 theory of imperialism “as the highest stage of capitalism” tailored to twenty-first-century geopolitics. This new framework illuminates U.S. unipolar control: dollar hegemony, military overextension, and structural dominance over international banking and trade. Its most glaring and lethal feature is the joint militarization of the planet and the accelerated warming of the atmosphere. Fueling more than 800 overseas bases turns the U.S. military into a planetary furnace, rendering it the single largest institutional consumer of petroleum and emitter of greenhouse gases in human history. With these global outposts enforcing a doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance,” the U.S. military and its allies function as the armed guardians of a planetary economic order, fusing foreign aggression and domestic policing into a single coercive apparatus that crushes, disciplines, and extinguishes political alternatives.

At the time of his writing, Ahmad assessed the Bush administration as the most right-wing American government in a century, a regime born from domestic political realignments and a bipartisan imperial consensus focused on locking down West Asian oil reserves. Since then, the two non-consecutive administrations of Donald Trump have surpassed even that assessment, aggressively maneuvering to consolidate military and policing power over strategic maritime pipelines of global commerce, particularly the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandab Strait. However, recent military setbacks suffered by the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli axis against Iranian and Yemeni resistance have laid bare the structural fragility of the imperial war machine. By firing low-cost drones and anti-ship missiles into critical shipping lanes, these resistance forces have sent shockwaves through global commodity markets, proving that the world’s primary energy arteries can no longer be monopolized at will. And these are nations and resistance movements whose size, economic power, and military technologies fall far short of anything comparable to the Soviet Union, let alone the highly technological and militarized societies that have attempted to defeat them.

When confronted with these vulnerabilities, Western media and policymakers fall back on the language of genocidal frontier warfare. Nineteenth-century Indigenous resistance against U.S. expansion, for example, was routinely demonized as innate savagery, fanatical malice, or senseless violence, erasing Native defense of land, sovereignty, and culture. Many of the prophetic and spiritually-driven Indigenous resistance movements—from eighteenth-century anti-colonial uprisings to the Water Protectors who locked themselves to machinery at Standing Rock in 2016—were described as “fanatical,” “apocalyptic,” and fundamentally irrational. Security agencies have even branded modern Indigenous land defenders as “jihadists.” Furthermore, early colonial accounts reduced Native nations to mere “pawns” or “proxies” of rival European empires, denying Indigenous peoples their own diplomatic strategies, political autonomy, and independent motives.

Modern discourse on Iran and Yemen deploys this exact colonial lexicon. The Islamic liberation movements undergirding contemporary resistance are demonized as “nihilistic,” “fanatical,” and “hard-line.” These labels reduce calculated regional deterrence tactics, sovereign diplomacy, and anti-imperial defense to a mindless “hatred for Western civilization.” When Ansar Allah enforces a maritime blockade in the Red Sea to oppose the genocide in Gaza, Western headlines frame the strategic action as “lawless piracy” or “tribal lawlessness” rather than an assertion of sovereign power in service of regional liberation. Rather than calling Ansar Allah—a Yemeni resistance movement—by its name, Western media flattens it into a rogue “Houthi tribal clan.” Simultaneously, commentators strip the movement of local agency by reducing it to a passive Iranian “puppet” or “proxy.” Framing Iran and its allied movements as rogue actors operating against Western civilization justifies unilateral strikes, severe economic blockades, and the criminalization of defense against imperialist aggression—recycling nineteenth-century frontier mythologies to legitimize the extreme violence of the U.S.-Israeli settler colonial nexus.

Twenty-five years after the launch of the Global War on Terror, the dialectic between foreign aggression, domestic militarism, and planetary heating has reached a critical flashpoint. The imperial state’s obsession with securing strategic energy arteries through brute force exposes the core contradiction of twenty-first-century imperialism: it must scorch the atmosphere to protect the circulation of capital. The hyper-imperialist apparatus—for all its technological firepower and planetary emissions—finds its authority surprisingly fragile at the very nodes that sustain global capital. By framing regional self-determination as lawless fanaticism and innate savagery, the U.S. attempts to mask its strategic weakness behind a moral crusade—replaying the rhetoric of the frontier, this time less as tragedy than as farce. This vocabulary cannot conceal the deeper, unfolding reality: the global order built on full-spectrum dominance is increasingly unable to contain the multipolar resistance rising against it.

This piece first appeared on The Red Scare.