Imperialism Laundered

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Similar to the process of money laundering, taking dirty, illegal money and running it through legitimate businesses until it comes out looking clean, the US has figured out how to do the exact same thing with imperialism.

After World War II, openly owning colonies and calling yourself an empire became diplomatically faux pas, especially for a country whose entire marketed brand is “freedom and democracy.”

So how do you build and maintain a global empire without the bad optics? You launder it, use third parties, proxies, “allies,” and plausible deniability to do the dirty work while keeping your hands looking clean.

The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are perfect examples of this process.

These countries are about as far from being democracies that you can imagine, they in fact are absolute monarchies with horrific human rights records. Yet they are not only safe from American lectures about democracy, they are treated as close strategic partners.

Why? Because they’ve learned to survive and thrive by acting as the money launderers and enforcers of U.S. imperialism in West Asia and Africa.

Take Sudan. One of the most strategically important places on Earth, sitting along almost the entire western bank of the Red Sea, a critical global trade route.

Sudan just so happens to also be rich in gold, fertile land, and happens to share borders with nearly every mineral-rich country in Eastern North Africa. Historically it has always been one of the biggest colonial prizes. But how do you capture a country like that in the 21st century without losing face, considering all of the resulting mass graves?

Simple, you pay someone else to do it.

The UAE has been found to have ties to the horrors going on in Sudan, human rights investigators have found connections to funding, arming, and training the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful paramilitary group that has displaced millions, committed mass atrocities, and devastated the country. The UAE denies direct involvement, as is expected. But the pattern here is too familiar, destabilization through civil war, resulting in manufactured chaos, then looting through corporations and friendly governments while the locals fight over the scraps.

The U.S. gets access to Sudan’s wealth without direct accountability. The UAE gets a bigger piece of the pie and strategic influence. Everybody wins, well except the Sudanese people, who are left with rivers of blood and destroyed infrastructure.

This arrangement is brilliant for empire.

Destroy Sudan and it can’t join any meaningful resistance against U.S. imperialism in Africa. Keep it in perpetual civil war and you can point to it as an example of why “Western-led order” is supposedly necessary.

One of the biggest red flags in the Sudan situation is the UAE’s mysterious gold empire. The United Arab Emirates is one of the world’s largest gold traders and hubs, with massive gold refineries and exports. There’s just one problem, the UAE has virtually no gold mines of its own.

Yet somehow this tiny desert federation moves enormous quantities of gold, much of it reportedly coming from conflict zones like Sudan. Multiple investigations have traced Sudanese gold, often mined in RSF-controlled areas amid the civil war and atrocities, flowing into UAE refineries where it is processed and “legitimized” before entering global markets.

This is imperialism laundering in its most literal form, blood gold from a devastated African nation gets cleaned up in Dubai’s shiny refineries, turned into bars with clean paperwork, and sold on the international market.

The US empire doesn’t have to occupy your country. It just has to make sure no one else can stabilize it.

This is modern imperialism.

Direct colonialism in the modern world is just too bad of a look, so the empire shifted strategy to proxy warfare, economic warfare, and carefully chosen local partners who do the heavy lifting for it. The US has this habit of backing brutal dictators precisely because it allows Washington to be able to keep its hands clean, at least in the public’s eyes, maintaining some level of plausible deniability, while still controlling the outcome.

The suffering in Sudan is extensive, but for some reason doesn’t seem to get mentioned almost at all in Western news.

Tens of thousands have been killed, millions more displaced, large regions turned into hellscapes of famine, rape, and massacre. Hospitals bombed, markets destroyed, children starving in refugee camps, basically the same sort of thing being carried out in Gaza by the Israelis.

Yet the Western media treats it as a distant, incomprehensible African tragedy rather than the direct result of their own meddling and proxy warfare.

Deaths in the Global South are covered just some unfortunate but inevitable “tribal conflict” or the result of the area being a “failed state”, by their own faults of course…While even a fraction of the same body count in Europe or among predominantly white populations triggers wall-to-wall coverage, moral outrage, and urgent calls for intervention. Sudanese lives, like so many others in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, are portrayed as somehow worth less, accounting to simply collateral damage, rather than human beings with the same right to peace and dignity.

The media manages to frame their deaths in a way that makes Western audiences feel less urgency, less connection, and less guilt. After all, if their suffering is just another African civil war, why should we care? The empire depends on your indifference to keep the machine running.

But this has been the policy for a long time, want historical receipts that this has been going on for at least since the end of WW2?

Look at South Korea.

Post WW2 the U.S. supported Syngman Rhee, a ruthless authoritarian who suppressed dissent, and oversaw widespread corruption and violence. When popular resistance grew, the U.S. backed military coups and dictators like Park Chung-hee, who industrialized the country under brutal labor conditions, crushing labor movements and his political opposition. South Korea’s “economic miracle” was built on the backs of workers who had no rights, all while the U.S. maintained military bases and strategic control of the country, fully able to have stopped the brutality. Democracy only came later, and even then, under heavy American influence even to this day.

Chile is another great example where the U.S. backed Augusto Pinochet in the 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende. The CIA’s involvement in destabilizing Allende’s government is well-documented, and once Pinochet was in power, his regime disappeared, tortured, and murdered thousands of leftists and union organizers.

The “Chicago Boys”, U.S.-trained economist, turned Chile into a testing ground for neoliberal “shock therapy”. The U.S. got a loyal anti-communist ally and a model for how to crush leftist movements. Chile got mass graves and economic policies that enriched the few and impoverished the many, as we have come to expect.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has the same story.

The first democratically elected prime minister who wanted true independence and control over Congo’s vast mineral wealth, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated and dissolved in acid, with clear Western involvement. The U.S. and Belgium backed the corrupt and brutal Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu ruled for decades stealing billions while the country remained desperately poor. But Western corporations got to exploit Congo’s diamonds, coltan, copper, and other resources. While the Congolese people got poverty, violence, and child labor in mines to this day…

This pattern repeats across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The U.S. doesn’t need to run the country directly. It just needs a reliable local partner who will keep the resources flowing, suppress any genuine leftist or nationalist movements, and stay loyal to Washington. When that partner becomes too embarrassing or starts acting too independently, they get replaced, often through another coup or “color revolution.”

Imperialism never ended, it just took on a different look, but with the same results.

The skyscrapers, luxury cars, smartphones, and stock portfolios in the West are all paid for by rivers of blood in the Global South.

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