Why do so many geopolitical analysts assume the most heavily resourced empire in human history operates through the incoherent decisions of a group of politicians? [Alternatively] that it operates via a flawless, omniscient Masterplan hatched in a single smoke-filled room?
When we look at global geopolitics today—specifically the U.S.-led imperial core’s actions against countries like China, Russia, or Iran—much of the alternative media space suffers from a cartoonish misunderstanding of how complex institutions and organizations work. If a U.S. military operation fails to achieve its maximalist goal, commentators immediately declare the empire “defeated” or incompetent.
But empires, like city governments, do not surrender when a policy fails. They evaluate, they consult their stakeholders, they conduct studies, and they adapt. To think that there is a grand masterplan or likewise to insist that there is no plan at all, are assumptions with political consequences.
Nel Bonilla: Planning, Not Masterplans
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Nel Bonilla is an academic whose terrestrial location and workplace I’ve so far been unable to ascertain, though her substack says she is:
A PhD candidate specializing in Migration Sociology, Social Geography, and Conflict Studies. I want to understand the links between human movements, urban dynamics, and the socio-political forces that shape our world.
She is also an anti-imperialist and systems thinker who writes with an aplomb remarkable by any measure but simply astonishing – here’s a screengrab from an interview a year ago with Pascal Lottaz –
… in one so youthful. She first came to my attention with an essay posted June 28, 2025 on the Worldlines substack and featuring prominently, as did the Pascal Lottaz interview, in my post: Road to WW3. Part 3: capturing minds. At issue was how Europe’s governments could act so manifestly against the interests of their economies and the citizens they nominally represent – above all in the economically suicidal proxy war on Russia in Ukraine – to further those of their US groomers. To which Nel weighed in:
… the answer does not lie in pure and straightforward corruption or ideological fervor. Far more banal and effective, it also lies in biographies, networks, and institutions; in hegemony on the level of the functional elite: when ruling ideas become common sense. And in this case, hegemony is not enforced solely through violence but through education, elite recruitment, and ritualized repetition.
The second time she caught my eye was on a matter that has long vexed anti-imperialists: does Israel dictate US policy by way of powerful (at least till recently) lobby groups like AIPAC, or does it simply look that way because the interests of US elites (as distinct from those of most Americans) align for reasons explored in my series on US Neocons & Israel’s far Right? Here too her contribution – a March 15 substack post whose textbook thesis-antithesis-synthesis approach seeks to bridge the gap between the first group as exemplified by John Mearsheimer, and the second as exemplified by Brian Berletic and Stephen Gowans – was impressive even if I do remain, subject to the caveat I set out a week ago in Zugzwang for Israel …
when a settler colony is deeply integrated within the elites of its imperial backer – think French Algeria, and Ireland from the 1801 Act of Union through the 1922 creation of the Occupied Six Counties to the present day – the relationship is always more complex, more deeply entwined, than that of master-servant.
… far closer to Brian and Steve than to John.
Now, with a June 17 posting, again on the Worldlines substack, Ms Bonilla has done it again – and with a timing for me bordering on the uncanny. Only the day before, I’d closed my June 16 post – Does we or doesn’t we have an M.o.U? – with this:
A question currently exciting anti-imperialist circles – is the US capable of achieving an energy dominance sufficient to rein in China’s rise? – will be considered in the very near future.
The context was my oft declared intent, routinely undermined by “events, dear boy, events”, to step back from the fray, curb my impulse to pen reactive posts, and so open up the space to revisit axioms in more discursive pieces whose themes may be informed by current events but which take a wider view. To that end I anticipate three posts, not necessarily successive, on whether a US empire seeking to weaponise energy in its efforts to maintain global hegemony can actually pull that off.
This is the first such but, for the heavy lifting, here’s Ms Bonilla in sparkling form. Again in the spirit of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, she charts a third way, starting with an analogy drawn from her urban planning background before applying its lessons to the workings of a globe spanning empire viewed through the lens of energy control. She does not suppose empire’s stewards to be Machiavellian geniuses hatching fiendish plans in the smoke-filled wheelhouses and engine rooms of unbridled power …
… nor yet incompetent buffoons lurching between own goal and catastrophic miscalculation. The first error, she insists, leads to nihilistic apathy; the second to a place of comforting illusion and wishful thinking from which no useful response – to the barbarism now and yet to be – can possibly take root.
The piece is some 4200 words, a thirty-five minute read for most, but given its lucidity – and a gravitas laced with frequent flashes of levity – it handsomely repays the investment. If I have a carp – and I always do – it’s that the exuberant call to arms of its final section is big on vision but light on substance.
I can excuse that. She only has one pair of hands and where she leaves off, we may feel free to step in.
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