
The Dig Anti-War w/ Ben Mabie & Salar Mohandesi
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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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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.
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.
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.


