The Dig

Anti-War w/ Ben Mabie & Salar Mohandesi

25 snips
Mar 10, 2026
Salar Mohandesi, teacher and writer on emancipatory politics and internationalism. Ben Mabee, organizer and strategist involved in left analysis and anti-war work. They dissect US imperial behavior, how modern war-making shields power from popular resistance, why broad anti-war movements have waned, and strategies for rebuilding durable, cross-issue anti-imperial organizing.
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INSIGHT

U.S. Imperialism Is Continuous And Evolving

  • U.S. imperialism is long-standing and changing rather than a recent Trump aberration.
  • Salar Mohandasi traces continuity from settler colonialism and slavery to modern bipartisan militarism that now refuses even the fiction of rules or multilateral legitimacy.
INSIGHT

Imperial Decline Produces Brazen Risk Taking

  • Relative decline shows in tech, dollar challenges, and global unpopularity, producing desperate, riskier U.S. foreign policy.
  • Ben Mabee compares this to Britain's late imperial scramble and warns decline can increase imperial violence rather than eliminate hegemony.
INSIGHT

Imperialism Needs A More Complex Theory Of The State

  • Classical Marxist theories rightly link capitalism and imperialism but over-reduce the state to a monolith.
  • Salar warns states are complex, internally contested ensembles where motives (evangelicals, geopolitics) can outweigh pure capitalist profit logic.
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