From Ukraine to the Persian Gulf,
the superpowers no longer call the shots!
By Yorgos Mitralias
Drawing by Sonia Mitralia
The first major lesson from the wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf is already glaringly obvious: the superpowers no longer call the shots! Despite their overwhelming military superiority, both Putin’s Russia and Trump’s United States are encountering countless “unforeseen” difficulties, are failing to break the resistance of far weaker countries, and are at high risk of being humiliated—a scenario that could well plunge them into a crisis of the gravest kind.
The raw facts speak for themselves: the war against Iran, which Trump often described as a mere… “short excursion,” and which was supposed to end after “two or three days,” has already been going on for three months, with no one able to predict when or how it will end. As for the war against Ukraine, which Putin called a mere… “special military operation”—and which was supposed to end after 4–5 days with the Russian army’s triumphant entry into Kyiv—has already been going on for over four years, and its victims (dead and wounded military personnel and civilians) now number nearly… two million! In short, Trump and Putin, with parallel lives and ideologies, share parallel bloodbaths and disasters!…
Indeed, Trump the real estate tycoon and Putin the KGB agent share not only the same megalomania but also the same ideology and the same anti-democratic, racist, repressive, virilist, and hyper-nationalist practices that make them die-hard fascists. And so it is no coincidence that both are the pillars of this Brown International of our nightmares, which brings together practically every right-wing extremist, neo-Nazi, and neo-fascist in the world!
So, given their aforementioned distinctive traits, their Ukrainian and Iranian misadventures take on a far greater dimension and significance. It is no longer just the traditional North American and Russian superpowers that are entering a crisis because they are unable to crush their adversaries once and for all. In reality, what is currently entering a deep and multidimensional crisis through these two superpowers—Russia and the United States—is something far more significant: the capitalist system itself. A capitalist system that, for the second time in 100 years, is resorting to its traditional lifeline and its “extreme solutions”: war and a frontal assault on human rights and democratic freedoms, as well as on what remains of its bourgeois democracy!
Hence this pervasive anxiety, this increasingly widespread sense of the end of the world, because the crisis of our barbaric and inhuman superpowers is undermining, eroding, and ultimately destroying the old (neoliberal) order without being able to impose a new one. However, such a situation is dangerous enough for the interests of those at the top to prompt them to react. And so all those who, just a year or even six months ago, displayed boundless servility toward Trump, are now distancing themselves and even going so far as to consider a divorce from the American superpower. And all this while even Russia’s traditional “friends” and “allies” are currently turning their backs on Putin, going so far as to refuse to stand beside him on the official podium in Red Square during major commemorations.
But, as might be expected, it is within their respective countries that the reaction from those in power against the warmongering “adventurism” of Trump and Putin is now beginning to emerge. And while in the United States a wind of revolt against Trump is now beginning to blow even within the ranks of the Republican Party, the situation is not very different in this Russia of endless conspiracies and palace coups—a legacy of the Tsarist and Stalinist eras, to which Putin, incidentally, lays claim: Putin’s popularity is, for the first time, in near free fall; leaks regarding the crisis of confidence taking hold at the highest levels of power are multiplying; and this atmosphere of the end of a reign—exacerbated by the poor performance of the Russian economy (official forecasts now reduce this year’s growth from 1.3% to 0.4%), and above all by the failures and deadlocks of the war against Ukraine, are causing Putin the autocrat to grow increasingly suspicious of everyone.
And no doubt, he is entirely right to be suspicious. For, lately, he has been racking up nothing but failures and problems. He has lost not only his dear Orban in Hungary, but also his footholds in sub-Saharan Africa, where the Wagner mercenaries (now called …Afrika Korps) have just packed up and left, while Black Africa, which was once so close to him, is now screaming at him following the revelation of the atrocious and macabre fate his army has reserved for the hundreds of Africans—mostly South Africans—who found themselves, against their will, on the very front lines in Ukraine to serve as cannon fodder.
But the worst thing for Putin is that his army is no longer advancing in Ukraine and is even retreating under pressure from the Ukrainians, who are regaining the territory they lost since 2024! And as if that weren’t enough, the Ukrainian army is now taking the war into Russia, with its drones and missiles targeting energy and oil infrastructure as far as 2,000 km inside the country! The result is devastating not only because these strikes on pipelines, terminals, refineries, and ports have caused Russian oil production to plummet to its lowest level in 17 years, thus nullifying, at least in part, the beneficial effects of the “gifts” Trump gave Putin by lifting the sanctions on Russian oil exports. But also, and above all, because they make this war—which until recently felt too distant and abstract to Russian citizens—tangible to them for the first time, which is already affecting their morale and radically changing their perception of this colonial and barbaric war against the Ukrainian people.
It goes without saying that the first and greatest source of Putin’s misfortunes are those Ukrainian men and women who have been fighting heroically for 51 months, with unexpected success, against a (nuclear) power many times larger, more powerful, and better armed, thus defying all initial predictions from both their “friends” and their enemies. The fact that these Ukrainian men and women are not only resisting but also launching a counterattack can only inspire other peoples around the world who are victims of the same aggressions and the same oppressions at the hands of the same or other imperialist powers…
Unfortunately, the situation of the Iranian people is quite different, as they are trapped and caught between the fierce repression they face from a barbaric and obscurantist regime, and the devastating bombings by the Trump-Netanyahu duo, who couldn’t care less about their fate. Moreover, we must admit the sad reality: the war against Iran waged by American imperialism and its Israeli ally has not weakened, but on the contrary has strengthened the theocratic regime, at least for a time.
The conclusion, though provisional, is self-evident: the imperialist wars in both Ukraine and the Persian Gulf are not only backfiring on their instigators but are also sowing unprecedented chaos by sweeping away the order that has reigned over the world since the end of World War II. The ensuing crisis could become cataclysmic if humanity allows various billionaire neo-libertarians (1) and others nostalgic for Nazi extermination camps—with their messianic, deeply supremacist, inhuman, and misanthropic agendas—to take advantage of the situation and fill the vacuum created. It is up to all of us to react before it is too late…
Note
1. See Libertarians vs. Neoconservatives – War is splitting the Trumpist leadership: https://blogs.
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Categories: Perspectives, Trump, Uncategorized, war
The phrase “Brown International” does real work in Mitralias’s essay, and that is the problem. It lets him assert a unity—Trump and Putin as twin pillars of a single fascist formation, gathering “practically every right-wing extremist, neo-Nazi, and neo-fascist in the world”—without having to demonstrate it. The label substitutes for the analysis it pretends to summarize. And the cost is not merely stylistic. It turns off the very diagnostic that would let us act on these regimes differently, because they are different, and the differences are where strategy lives.
Start with what “fascism” classically named: a mass movement, mobilized from below through paramilitary formations, that smashes the workers’ organizations and then fuses with the capitalist state under a party that subordinates the old elites to it. The diagnostic value of the term was never the cruelty or the racism or the nationalism taken singly—plenty of non-fascist reactions supply all three—but the specific configuration: mass mobilization, the destruction of independent working-class institutions, and the party-state. Strip that out, and “fascist” becomes a synonym for “very bad authoritarian”—that is, it stops being a concept and instead becomes an affect.
Trump and Putin both fail to fit the classical configuration, but in opposite ways. Putin presides over a demobilized society; his power rests on atomization, on the deliberate prevention of any independent collective action, fascist street movements included. He does not have a mass party storming the institutions—he has a security apparatus and an oligarchy held in personal dependence. Trump, conversely, has a genuine mass base and a movement with menacing edges. Still, he commands no disciplined party that has subordinated American capital, no paramilitary that has broken the unions, and a base that is mobilized episodically and electorally far more than it is organized. One regime is over-centralized and under-mobilized; the other is mobilized but organizationally thin. Calling both “fascist” reveals nothing about either, and folding them into one International obscures their differences.
This is why I keep reaching for patrimonial Bonapartism instead of fascism. Bonapartism names a regime that rises above the contending classes by playing them off, resting on a personalized executive that claims to embody the nation directly, over the heads of parties and parliaments. The patrimonial inflection adds what Weber saw: rule as personal possession, the state staffed through loyalty and clientage rather than through a program or a movement. That framework predicts what we actually observe—the plebiscitary appeals, the hollowing of institutions into instruments of personal will, the oligarchic dependence, the demobilized or only intermittently mobilized base—and it predicts the fragility the “fascist” label obscures. Mitralias himself stumbles into the evidence for this when he reports the cracks: elite defections, a popularity in free fall, and the “endless conspiracies and palace coups. Those are not the symptoms of a consolidated fascism with a mass party behind it. They are the characteristic vulnerabilities of personalist Bonapartist rule, which has no organized social bloc to rely on when the leader falters. His own reporting undermines the very category he has proposed.
There is also a campist symmetry worth naming because it should bother us. The campist habit we have spent considerable effort criticizing takes a moral-typological label—” imperialism,” singular and capitalized—and uses it to flatten distinct states and conflicts into a single drama with predetermined sides. The “Brown International” is the same operation run from the anti-fascist end: one capitalized noun, one global conspiracy of like-minded villains, and sides assigned in advance. Both moves are satisfying because they convert analysis into recognition; you no longer have to study the specific articulation of class forces in a given state; you only have to identify which team a figure plays for. And both produce the same strategic result: paralysis dressed as clarity. If Trump and Putin are simply two faces of one fascist International, then the differences in how each regime can be split, pressured, and broken—the differences that determine where an opening might appear—become invisible.
The irony is that Mitralias’s essay contains a better argument than its frame. The substantive claim—that two militarily superior powers are failing to subdue far weaker adversaries and that the failure is generating crisis at the top of each regime—stands perfectly well without the fascism talk. It stands better without it, because the overextension argument depends precisely on these being personalist regimes whose authority is staked on the leader’s invincibility and therefore cannot absorb visible failure the way an institutionalized order can. The “Brown International” weakens that argument; it introduces a unity it lacks and one the evidence contradicts.
None of this is a plea for softness toward either regime. It is the opposite. We name a thing precisely so that we can fight it precisely. “Fascist” used as an epithet feels like the maximal charge, but it is analytically the weakest, because it tells us nothing we can use. “Patrimonial Bonapartism” is the less thrilling word and the more dangerous one—for them—because it points at where the structure breaks.