The New Dark Age

​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine speak during a news conference at the Pentagon.

Western threats against Iran reveal an imperial psychology unable to accept a multipolar world.

The sincere belief that the sadistic brutalization of the Palestinian people would sever their connection to their land; that a sixty-year siege on Cuba would compel its people to abandon their revolution; or that assassinating Iran’s revolutionary and spiritual leadership would force the country to surrender its sovereignty to its historic tormentors in the United States and the Zionist ethno-state of Israel—these are not simply policy miscalculations. They are manifestations of what I call the psychopathology of white supremacy.

This psychopathology is not reducible to individual prejudice. It is a racialized, narcissistic cognitive disorder embedded in the ideological and institutional architecture of Western power. It centers Europe and its settler extensions as the apex of human development and renders its adherents incapable of perceiving objective reality when confronted with non-European resistance. While rooted in the historical experience of Europe and its encounters with non-European people during the expansion of European power,  it can affect anyone socialized within the ideological and cultural mechanisms of the Pan-European colonial project.

As a non-material conceptual frame, it nevertheless produces material consequences. Since the first sustained contact between emerging European powers and the non-European world, this affliction has shaped policies that devastated societies, cultures, and millions of lives. It ensures that Western decision-makers repeatedly construct strategies that are counterproductive even to their own long-term interests when dealing with non-European peoples.

The disastrous decision to attack and escalate against Iran exemplifies this dynamic. It reflects arrogance and hubris born of centuries of assumed supremacy, temporarily reinforced by episodic tactical gains elsewhere such as Venezuela. Yet this posture ignores profound global shifts in power. Western policymakers are unable—or unwilling—to recognize that the conditions that once enabled them to impose their will unilaterally no longer exist. They act as if the world remains frozen in the immediate post-Cold War moment, when U.S. hegemony appeared uncontested.

This cognitive distortion is inseparable from white supremacy itself, which operates ideologically and structurally. Ideologically, white supremacy posits that the descendants of Europe represent the highest stage of civilization, that their institutions, religions, and social systems are inherently superior. Structurally, it is expressed through global institutions and arrangements that reproduce Western dominance: the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, NATO, the global banking system, and dollar hegemony. These institutions function as material instruments for maintaining global white power.

Following the Second World War, the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter affirmed that all peoples possess the right to peace, sovereignty, and self-determination. States were not to interfere in the internal affairs of others. These commitments were framed as extensions of Enlightenment liberalism. Yet for those subjected to colonial conquest and racial capitalism, these ideals were always contradicted by practice. Liberal universalism proclaimed equality while colonial modernity imposed hierarchy. Still, the myth of Western moral superiority endured—particularly among Western elites, their colonized intermediaries, and privileged sectors of the white working classes who benefited materially from imperial plunder.

Gaza has torn away the remaining veil. The spectacle of mass destruction, rationalized and defended in the name of “civilization,” exposes the moral contradictions long embedded in Western political culture. When Western powers felt compelled to maintain the appearance of humanitarian restraint, there were at least rhetorical limits on their conduct. In the current era of openly lawless global fascism led by the United States and Israel, those self-imposed constraints have disappeared.

We must harbor no illusions about the nature of Western power or its pathological commitment to maintaining white supremacy. A commitment that has a cross-class character.  The dehumanization of non-European peoples has always provided the ideological justification for enslavement, settler conquest in the Americas, colonial consolidation in Africa and Asia, and contemporary doctrines such as American exceptionalism. The same biblical imagery invoked in Gaza echoes the language of Manifest Destiny. The logic is consistent: the lives of non-Europeans are expendable in the service of a civilizational mission atoned by a white Christian God.

The racial dimension of imperial aggression becomes particularly clear in cases such as Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. These are not merely geopolitical rivals; they are targets marked by racialized narratives of irrationality, authoritarianism and political fanaticism. Narratives that are not just constructed by rightist forces but embraced by forces that define themselves as left, and anti-imperialist.  The resistance that emanates from global South forces challenges not only U.S. strategic interests but the myth of Western indispensability in both its left and right expressions.

Iran and Venezuela, working with BRICS partners, have developed mechanisms to circumvent sanctions through alternative trade arrangements and digital currencies. They have demonstrated that resource-rich nations can survive economic warfare. Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves in the world; Iran ranks among the top three. Iraq also occupies a critical position. Control over energy resources remains central to U.S. strategy, particularly in relation to China. The contest is not simply about regional influence but about preventing the emergence of a multipolar order that would weaken dollar dominance and, by extension, U.S. global leverage.

Dollar hegemony has been foundational to postwar U.S. economic growth and its capacity to sustain massive deficits. With national debt approaching unprecedented levels and annual deficits soaring, maintaining control over energy markets and reserve currency status is not optional—it is structural, and in fact, existential for Western white hegemony under the leadership of the U.S. Therefore, what is presented as a security doctrine is in fact an economic imperative.

“Full spectrum dominance,” articulated in U.S. national security strategy, calls for preventing the rise of any regional power capable of challenging U.S. supremacy. This doctrine explains the relentless pressure on Iran in West Asia and Venezuela in the Americas. It also clarifies U.S. interventions in Africa, including destabilization efforts that ensure regional powers remain subordinate.

Security-first narratives—counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, border enforcement—provide ideological cover. But beneath them lies a deeper crisis of Western capitalism. As that crisis intensifies, fascist restructuring becomes more explicit. Opposition to imperial policy is criminalized. Surveillance expands. Anti-terror and public order laws are weaponized. Domestically, Indigenous, African/Black, migrant, and labor movements are reframed as security threats. Internationally, sanctions regimes function as collective punishment, imposing siege conditions on entire populations.

The psychopathology of white supremacy fuels this process. Unable to accept limits, Western elites double down on coercion. Yet this very overreach contains its own contradiction. By misreading global realities and underestimating the resolve of targeted nations, Western powers accelerate their own strategic decline. Each failed intervention erodes legitimacy. Each sanction that pushes nations toward alternative financial systems weakens the architecture of dollar dominance.

For those engaged in social justice and radical struggle, these developments pose urgent questions. Can justice be achieved domestically without confronting imperial power internationally? Can movements ignore the racialized foundations of global capitalism while seeking reform within its structures? The consolidation of fascism abroad and repression at home are not separate phenomena; they are mutually reinforcing.

Renewed U.S. dominance, pursued through militarism and economic warfare, reshapes the terrain of struggle. It narrows democratic space, intensifies polarization, and demands clarity. There can be no effective oppositional politics that refuses to confront the ideological and material consequences of normalized white supremacy. Anti-racism detached from anti-imperialism becomes hollow. Anti-imperialism that ignores racial hierarchy is incomplete and reactionary.

The psychopathology of white supremacy, paradoxically, may be its own undoing. By distorting perception, it drives policies that hasten the decline of the “collective West.” By denying the humanity of others, it strengthens their resolve. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Palestine demonstrate that sovereignty cannot be bombed or sanctioned out of existence. Resistance exposes the limits of the Pan European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy.

The choice before radical movements is stark. Either we confront fascism—domestically and internationally—and challenge the structures that sustain it, or we drift into accommodation and become complicit in our own subordination. History suggests that empires rarely relinquish power voluntarily. They must be compelled by organized, principled resistance grounded in an unflinching analysis of power.

The era of illusions is over. What is required is clarity—and the responsibility to act.

No Compromise, No Retreat!!

Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).