Sovereignty or Surrender: The Question of the Great Deterrent

by Mazen

In 2026, we have seen sovereignty praised in speeches and violated in practice. The difference between a state that is “independent” and one that merely administers its own dependence is not found in flags, constitutions, or UN seats, but in power–who controls a territory’s labor and resources, and who can resist coercion when those decisions threaten global capital. Imperialism names the system that makes that resistance necessary, functioning to deny real self-determination. In this climate, nuclear weapons emerge as the great deterrent, not as a romanticized symbol of force, but rather a material answer to a material problem.

What about world peace? How would having more nukes be good for the future? That question abandons dialectical method and treats “peace” as a moral wish detached from the relations that produce war. As Kwame Ture reminded us, peace is not the same as liberation. You can have “peace” alongside injustice. To imagine world peace inside a system built on sanctions, coups, blockades, proxy wars, and regime change led by the United States and its allies is idealism. It smuggles in the liberal premise that violence is an aberration, when in fact, under imperialism, violence is a recurring instrument for maintaining the conditions of capitalist accumulation.

Sovereignty has never been settled by the mere raising of a flag. Kwame Nkrumah warned that political independence can coexist with domination in another form: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.” That is the trap confronting post-colonial struggle: formal sovereignty without economic power becomes sovereignty in appearance, dependence in substance, especially when the commanding heights of the economy remain subordinated to foreign capital and the imperial states that protect it.

This is why sovereignty must be understood as a material relation of power rather than a legal status. As Bikrum Gill explains, sovereignty is the question of who controls the use of resources and labor, who decides what is produced, for whom, and where the surplus flows. Nkrumah’s insight follows from this– if the economic system is directed from outside, political policy will follow, because politics cannot be separated from production and capital. Under global capitalism, sovereignty is contested through struggle over land, labor, and resources, and through coercive mechanisms that enforce unequal development when oppressed nations attempt to break free.

Imperialism’s Coercive Machinery

Imperialism is that coercive system: the global organization of capitalism that enforces unequal exchange and blocks genuine self-determination when it threatens the imperial core. Its instruments strike first at the economic foundation of sovereignty. Sanctions weaponize the dollar system and banking networks, turning trade, insurance, and credit into tools of obedience. Debt regimes through the IMF, World Bank, and private bond markets convert public budgets into repayment machines, forcing austerity, privatization, and the selloff of national assets. When economic siege fails, imperialism escalates militarily through coups, covert operations, proxy war, and direct intervention, laundering force through the language of “stability,” “democracy,” or “human rights.” The aim is consistent; relocate decision-making over labor and resources away from the masses and toward foreign capital and the states that defend it.

This is not distant history; it is happening before our eyes. In Venezuela, sanctions and regime-change pressure culminated in a U.S. military operation that kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and transported him to a prison in Brooklyn. The point is not only the spectacle of capture, but the material consequences. The United States moved to control Venezuelan oil flows, disrupting shipments to Cuba and tightening the noose on an island already strangled by blockade. Washington now issues managed authorizations over whether Venezuelan-origin oil can even be resold to Cuba. This is imperialism in real time; sovereignty is made conditional by controlling the arteries of energy and finance, then blaming the resulting crisis on “socialism” and “failure to govern.”

A dialectical and historical materialist method clarifies that this is not accidental; it is produced by contradiction. Four contradictions shape the modern epoch and repeatedly erupt as crisis and war: proletariat versus bourgeoisie in capitalist countries; imperialist powers versus oppressed nations and peoples; inter-imperialist rivalries over markets and spheres of influence; and socialism versus imperialism/capitalism. These contradictions generate the functioning of the imperial order: crises exported to the periphery, militarization presented as security, and regime-change operations justified as humanitarian necessity. Seen this way, the nuclear question is not a moral anomaly but a political problem produced by the contradictions of imperialism.

The Great Deterrent: Why Vulnerability Invites Regime Change

If sovereignty is material, security cannot be treated as a separate “military” question floating above political economy. The ability to nationalize industries, chart an independent foreign policy, or break from unequal exchange means little if the state can be strangled into collapse or bombed into submission the moment it exercises that power. This is where the great deterrent enters. Under imperialism, nuclear weapons shift the balance of forces by raising the cost of regime-change war, often forcing the imperial camp to recalibrate because decisive military overthrow becomes more dangerous. This deterrent cannot be reduced to some bloodthirsty obsession, it is the harsh conclusion oppressed nations draw from historical experience. It is no accident that the Soviet nuclear program became a world-historical signal that the imperial core could be deterred. For socialist and anti-imperialist movements, nuclear proliferation became protection for the political space in which a socialist path could exist. Once strategic parity became imaginable, sovereignty was redefined for the oppressed world: not simply whether independence could be declared, but whether it could be defended.

The Iraq war is the open textbook for how imperialism treats sovereignty when a state is vulnerable. Iraq endured sanctions, inspections, and political containment, then was invaded anyway under the claim it possessed “weapons of mass destruction.” The WMD narrative functioned as cover for regime change; the absence of those weapons changed nothing because the objective was subordination. Saddam Hussein was captured and executed, the state reorganized under occupation, and Iraqi society thrown into catastrophe.

It is in that context that this exchange lands with force:

Vladimir Putin: “If Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons, no one would have dared lay a finger on him.”

President of Kazakhstan: “Sometimes it’s better not to have nuclear weapons — and to keep normal, good relations with everyone.”

Putin: “That’s exactly what Saddam Hussein thought too.”

In an imperialist order, “normal relations” are not a shield. The system punishes those it can punish and escalates when it calculates the costs are manageable. That becomes clearest when we look at what happens once the deterrent question is settled against a country.

Compliance and Exposure: Cuba, South Africa, Libya, DPRK

I bring up Cuba, South Africa, and Libya not as historical name-drops but because their conditions today reveal what sovereignty looks like when it is denied in practice.

Cuba is an early example of the cost of losing a shield: during the missile crisis, the presence of Soviet nuclear weapons briefly raised the price of a U.S. invasion, but when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles, Cuba was reportedly furious not because it desired catastrophe, but because it understood what was being removed: a deterrent that constrained imperial action. What followed was not “peace,” but decades of blockade and strangulation aimed at making everyday life unlivable until political surrender becomes thinkable.

South Africa points to another dimension of the same problem: the unrealized possibility of the periphery approaching strategic parity. The apartheid regime developed a nuclear weapons capability, then dismantled it during the transition period precisely as pressure mounted and as the end of white minority rule became unavoidable. A widely argued reading is that the dismantlement was not only about reintegration and legitimacy, but also about control: the bomb was tolerable in the hands of an apartheid state, and intolerable if it might be inherited by a future African-led majority government. In other words, the global hierarchy of force could not accept the idea of an African strategic nuclear power.

Libya is the bluntest lesson written into the present. Gaddafi abandoned the nuclear path to avoid what happened to Saddam Hussein, yet disarmament still did not guarantee sovereignty. Disarmament removed a potential deterrent, and when imperialism decided to strike, Gaddafi was killed, and Libya was shattered, leaving fragmentation and permanent crisis. Together, these cases show why the deterrent keeps returning as a political problem: imperialism does not reward compliance with safety. In the current world order, a nation that cannot impose threats to the imperial forces is not treated as sovereign, it is treated as administrable.

North Korea occupies such a decisive place for the same reason. The discussion is often diverted into moral diagnosis, “dictatorship,” “pariah,” “human rights”, as if that explains the external contradictions. A materialist approach does not deny that internal contradictions may exist within a nation, but it refuses to let them replace the strategic question. Unlike Cuba, which sits directly beside the United States and therefore faced the immediate danger of becoming a nuclear flashpoint in Washington’s own backyard, the DPRK is positioned in Northeast Asia beside China and Russia, two major powers whose existence complicates any simple U.S. regime-change scenario. This does not mean North Korea is safe or free from encirclement: it faces South Korea, Japan, U.S. troops, military exercises, sanctions, and the broader Pacific architecture of U.S. containment. But its geography places it within a regional balance of forces very different from Cuba’s isolation in the Caribbean. The DPRK’s nuclear deterrent must be understood within that terrain as part of a wider geopolitical reality where U.S. aggression risks escalation beyond the peninsula. Whatever one thinks of the DPRK, the country with a credible deterrent has not been subjected to the full, familiar regime-change sequence. It is sanctioned and threatened, but deterrence constrains straightforward military overthrow and forces pressure to shift in form. Deterrence buys time and space for a nation to persist rather than be decided by external power.

Deterrence also raises a deeper Marxist question: how does sovereignty relate to resolving internal contradictions? In Mao’s terms, we must identify the principal contradiction. Under siege and encirclement, the contradiction between imperialism and the nation can become principal, reshaping all other contradictions. This does not ignore class struggle; it conditions it within a terrain defined by survival. Sovereignty is not the endpoint, it is the condition of possibility for resolving contradictions on a liberated basis. Without sovereignty, contradictions are confronted externally: through sanctions, coups, or wars that collapse the state.

Iran and the Recycling of the “Nuclear Threat” Script

From here, the Iran question comes into sharper focus. The drumbeat about Iran “developing nuclear weapons” is ideological preparation that makes coercion “justifiable”. It frames imperialistic economic war and military escalation as “defensive,” while obscuring the underlying issue: Iran’s refusal to be absorbed into the U.S Zionist-regional order. The nuclear histories of Cuba, South Africa, Libya, and of North Korea hangs over this moment.

The Iraq precedent clarifies what is at stake. Before the invasion, Iraq endured years of sanctions, inspections, and media saturation until “WMD” became treated as fact and war was sold as prevention. Today, Trump and Netanyahu attempt to manufacture the same atmosphere around Iran. Netanyahu has claimed since the early 1990s that Iran’s nuclear capability is “imminent,” repeatedly shifting the timeline, months away, then “weeks away”, so urgency becomes permanent and escalation always appears justified. The point is not that Iraq and Iran are identical; it is that the script is familiar: a repeated nuclear claim used to normalize siege, sabotage, and war, while the deeper issue of sovereignty remains unstated.

On Saturday, February 28, 2026, Israel said it launched a “pre-emptive” attack against Iran, and an Israeli defense official said the operation was coordinated with the United States. Iran’s response has also been framed as part of a longer regional rupture. The Islamic Republic has named its response operation “Khatm Al-Tufan”—“The End of the Flood”, signaling Iran’s view of its objectives as a continuation of Al Aqsa Flood and an attempt to decisively close that chapter. The naming is politically revealing: it signals that Iran is not treating this as an incident to be managed back into “normal relations,” but as a sovereignty question, one in which surrender means accepting permanent penetrability under U.S.-Zionist power.

If we take this seriously, then the nuclear question appears less as an isolated “security debate” and more as a concentrated expression of imperialism’s demand that certain states remain permanently penetrable. The imperialist camp reserves deterrence for itself and its allies; “normal relations” means normalization of dependency: accept the financial order, accept the security order, accept limits on development and alliances. The moment a state refuses those limits, sovereignty is recoded as aggression and coercion is recoded as defense.

The specter of Iran’s “nuclear weapons” is invoked not simply to describe a possibility, but to manufacture legitimacy for sanctions, sabotage, assassination, and war preparations, making the public accept as “preventive” what is in reality punitive. At a certain point, the content of the accusation becomes secondary to its function: keep the target bleeding economically, isolated diplomatically, and threatened militarily until it capitulates or collapses. When sovereignty becomes this costly, the choice is clarified in the harshest terms: surrender to imperial terms, or defend the capacity to decide.

Sources:

Kwame Nkrumah — Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism

V.I. Lenin — Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

Mao Zedong — “On Contradiction”

Iran Pt. 3: The Empire vs. Iran w/ Bikrum Gill

Nuclear Threat Initiative — South Africa nuclear disarmament

Black Agenda Report — North Korea Stands Firm

Samir Amir — Contemporary Imperialism

Black Agenda Report — Cuba, Venezuela and Regime Change

Putin Quote: https://x.com/Saffron_Sniper1/status/2029029608306389260