Imperial Power

Capital accumulation in the imperial core requires appropriating cheap labour and resources from the periphery, and ensuring access to their markets. To maintain this arrangement, the core states seek to prevent global South governments from pursuing economic sovereignty and independent industrial development, as this may increase the supply price or challenge the core’s industrial and technological monopolies.¹ 

Toward this end, the core states, led by the United States, have built up a massive system of military power which they wield to intervene in countries across the global South.¹ These interventions have taken the form of invasions, occupations, colonization, regime change – including against democratically elected leaders – and violent counter-insurgency operations against socialist movements and any liberation movement that pursues meaningful economic sovereignty. This often occurs with the support of reactionary national elites.

The United States, which has only 4% of the world’s population, accounts for more than half of total world military expenditure. The US is the main force within NATO, the military alliance of the imperial core, and together with other major US military partners this bloc accounts for 75% of the world’s military expenditure. By contrast, Russia accounts for about 3% of global military spending, and China accounts for 10%. 

The disproportionate military power of the core states is even starker when military spending is measured in per capita terms. This graph shows military spending per capita as a multiple of the global average. We see that the United States spends 12.6 times more than the global average.  Meanwhile China spends 40% less than the global average, and its military spending is 1/20th that of the United States.

These maps demonstrate the geographical distribution of foreign military bases controlled by the United States (the dropdown menu toggles to the UK and France). The US has 902 active military bases, concentrated in regions of key geopolitical significance. These include: 1) The regions surrounding the Panama canal; 2) The Middle East, where the US props up compliant regimes, suppresses socialist liberation movements, and ensures access to oil and other critical resources; 3) Germany and Europe, where the US seeks to prevent the rise of geopolitical competitors, crush socialist movements, and maintain an aggressive posture toward Russia; and 4)184 military bases in East and Southeast Asia, established as a cordon around revolutionary China.  

The United States has officially acknowledged the use of military force in over 100 countries over the past 200 years.

In the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries, the US sent troops to much of Latin America – invasions that historians refer to as the “banana wars” because the US sought to protect its commercial interests in agricultural products like bananas, tobacco, sugarcane, etc. The brutality of these campaigns is illustrated by the US invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1935). The US disbanded Haiti’s democratically-elected national assembly after it refused to legalise US ownership of Haitian land; they instituted a system of slave labour where Haitians were chained together to build roads for US military purposes; and they launched a brutal counter-insurgency campaign against the Haitian resistance.²

Throughout the 20^th century, the US invaded multiple countries in Eurasia to suppress popular revolutions aimed at securing rights for workers and peasants. Following the Russian revolution of 1917, the US invaded Russia on the side of the White Army, a military force that massacred political dissidents, launched antisemitic pogroms, and attempted to restore the rule of former landlords.³  When Vietnamese revolutionaries overthrew French colonialism, the US responded by invading the country, carpet bombing rural villages, rounding up peasants into concentration camps, and imposing a violent military dictatorship on the south of Vietnam, before expanding the war to neighbouring Cambodia and Laos, killing millions of people.⁴  

In recent decades, US military interventions have disproportionately targeted the Middle East, including in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was aimed in large part at securing US control of Iraqi oil resources. This invasion resulted in around 1 million Iraqi deaths by 2009.⁵

The dropdown menu toggles to UK military interventions abroad, revealing that Britain has invaded or used military force in nearly every country in the global South.

The core states – particularly the US, Britain, and France – have a long history of engaging in regime change operations in other countries to shape the global political landscape in their interests, maintaining the conditions for geopolitical supremacy and capital accumulation.⁶  While this is sometimes done through direct military intervention – as in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan or the 2003 invasion of Iraq – the core states generally rely on covert interference through local proxies. 

For instance, in 1973, the US orchestrated a coup d’état against Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, bringing to power the ruthless military dictator General Augusto Pinochet.⁷ Similar cases include the 1954 coup against Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz, or the 1964 coup against Brazil’s Joao Goulart, regime change operations which imposed military dictatorships that lasted for decades.⁸

In the vast majority of regime change operations, the US has supported violent and repressive forces. During the 1980s, for instance, the US provided critical support to Cambodian terrorist organisations led by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, a group that had killed an estimated two million people during its time in government in the 1970s.⁹  At the same time, the US was also seeking to topple the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, providing billions of dollars in military aid to the Mujahideen, an extremist force that would eventually become the Taliban in the 1990s.¹⁰ Decades earlier, in the late-1940s and 1950s, the US recruited former Nazis and Nazi collaborators to lead clandestine operations against the socialist governments of Eastern Europe and the USSR.¹¹

Note that this map does not capture the many US regime change operations conducted prior to 1949, under the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The menu option allows users to view a map of UK-backed operations.

Military power is not the only expression of imperialist intervention. The United States claims to be a supporter of democracy, and yet regularly intervenes in foreign elections to corrupt the democratic process in favour of US interests. A recent study by Dov Levin documents that the US intervened in foreign elections at least 128 times between 1946 and 2014, usually to prevent socialist or other left-wing parties from forming a government or retaining power. Some countries have been targeted repeatedly. For instance, the US has targeted Venezuela 4 times, Japan 6 times, and Italy 8 times. Interference may take the form of campaign funding, attacks on political parties, threats to harm the country if the election goes against US interests, or using aid as leverage over electoral outcomes. Levin documents both overt and covert interference. Because not all instances of covert interference can be captured, these figures should be understood as conservative. 

The United States employs economic sanctions as a central pillar of imperialist coercion, systematically targeting nations that challenge US global dominance or the core-periphery hierarchy of global capitalism.

Over 140 countries—including many close US allies—have faced U.S. sanctions since 1950. In many cases, these sanctions entail relatively benign financial restrictions designed to induce policy changes in US client states. But in other cases, these unilateral punishments function as economic warfare, strangling access to global markets, destabilizing industries, and inflaming crises to provoke state collapse.¹²

A recent study found that unilateral sanctions imposed by the US and EU were responsible for on average more than 564,000 deaths per year from 2012 to 2021, or a total of 38 million deaths over the period 1970-2021. In one well-known case, US sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s led to widespread malnutrition, lack of clean water, and shortages of medicine and electricity.¹³ More recently, US economic warfare against Venezuela has resulted in a severe economic crisis, with one study estimating that these sanctions caused 40,000 excess deaths in just one year, from 2017 to 2018.¹⁴

Hunger and deprivation are not an accidental by-product, they are a key objective of US sanctions. This is clear from an internal US government memo written in April 1960, which explains the purpose of US sanctions against Cuba. The memo argues that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba… to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁵ 

By suffocating independent development, sanctions reinforce a global order where wealth flows upward to the imperial core, ensuring cheap labour, deregulated markets, and unfettered access to resources for Western capital.

The menu option allows users to toggle between current and historical US sanctions. For current sanctions, users can choose between the Global Sanctions Database (GSD), which covers all cases of US sanctions, or the sanctions list provided by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which includes only the more stringent sanctions regimes.

This chart shows “net resource availability”, a metric used by political scientists to measure the resources that nations have at their disposal to project power on the international stage, beyond what they require for domestic purposes.¹⁶ This metric indicates that the US and the rest of the core maintain an overwhelming share (up to 90%) of global geopolitical strength. Even relatively strong peripheral states, such as the USSR and China,¹⁷ have had only a small fraction of global net resource availability, with the USSR holding about 7% at its peak, and China holding 5% today. While strong peripheral states may have the capacity to contest the dictates of the imperialist states, they have never had the capacity to impose an alternative world order. The core has always maintained overwhelming dominance, while seeking to cast even marginal increases in the power of peripheral states as an existential threat.

Notes

Suggested citation: Hickel, J., Sullivan, D., Arellano, J., Barbour, F., & Zoomkawala, H. (2025). “Imperial power”, Global Inequality Project. Accessed at: https://globalinequality.org/imperial-power

1. Patnaik & Patnaik (2021), Kadri (2014).

For information about US military dominance and intervention in the global South, the work of Noam Chomsky is indispensable. See: Chomsky (1973, 1987, 1993, 2006), Chomsky & Herman (1979), Herman & Chomsky (1988), Chomsky & Prashad (2022).  Additional work in this area includes, Prashad (2020), Bevins (2020), Blum (2014), Klein (2007).

2. Schmidt (1971). For more on US intervention in Central America, see: LaFeber (1993).

3. Foglesong (1995).

4. Turse (2013), Chomsky (1973), Herman & Chomsky (1988: ch. 5-6).

5. Herman & Peterson (2010: 34, 109).

6. The map of US-backed regime change operations combines several sources, including the list of Cold War-era regime change campaigns compiled by O’Rourke (2018: 3) and Blum’s list of regime change operations based on research from Blum (2014). In addition, we added three cases discussed by Bevins (2020), namely, the US-backed coup d’états in Argentina (1976) and Uruguay (1973), and the US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor (1975). Further cases were obtained from an edited volume from Wikileaks (2015), which documents that the US backed an attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the Gaza strip in 2006-08, and which provides additional information on the regime change operations in Syria and Venezuela. Podur (2020) documents the US role in supporting violent regime change efforts by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, in Rwanda (1991-94) and the D. R. Congo (1996-97 and 1998-2003).

7. Kornbluh (2003).

8. Hickel (2017), Bevins (2020).

9. Fawthrop & Jarvis (2004).

10. Mitchell (2002), Mamdani (2004).

11. O’Rourke (2018: ch. 6), Chomsky (1987: 197-198).

12. Davis & Ness (2022).

13. Gordon (2010).

14. Weisbrot & Sachs (2019).

15. Yaffe (2022).

16. Beckley (2018) shows that compared to aggregate GDP, this approach more accurately predicts the outcomes of wars and other disputes between great powers over the past 200 years. This suggests it is a more accurate indicator of relative geopolitical strength. In his original study, Beckley used GDP in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, whereas the Global Inequality Project uses GDP at market exchange rates (MER) for the default calculation of net resource availability. Scholars point out that the capacity to project power internationally depends on the ability to purchase advanced technological and military equipment on the world market, something which is not adequately captured by PPPs (see Gilboy & Heginbotham 2012: 120). However, you can use the dropdown menu at the bottom of the graph to show the estimates of geopolitical power calculated with Beckley’s original PPP approach. 

17. For an important critique of the standard narrative that the USSR represented a rival superpower or ‘peer competitor’ to the USA, see: Sanchez-Sibony (2014). For a critical look at the standard rise-of-China narrative, see: Li (2021).