IF there is anything I remember from my classroom days when I was doing my doctorate at the University of Toronto was a discussion in the class of a paper by a Polish economist on the transfer of wealth from the USSR to Poland.

Packed with statistics, the paper argued that the USSR was a strong aid giver to countries of the Warsaw Pact Treaty. This memory was immediately evoked when I read the following words of Ravi Dev: “Coloniality’s hierarchies of race, culture and economics inhere no less in Russia, China or Venezuela than the US.”

This is a gross misinterpretation of international relations and world history. I cannot believe Ravi would pen such a subjective reflection and put it into an analysis. Ravi knows much about American imperialism (which has no equivalent even up to today), British colonial hegemony, post-1945 the rise of the USSR and the emergence of China as a superpower, to make such a misleading statement.

I am at a loss as to how to present a counter-argument to Dev because the facts are so mountainous you are confused as to how to use them and which one to use. I will begin my rejection by saying ideology, culture, religion and history are the difference in the approach to big power relations with post-colonial lands. The colonialialty in relations between the US and Europe with the Third World on the one hand is completely (and I am unapologetic in the use of the adverb, “completely”) different with the bond that had developed between the USSR and the Third World and China and the developing world.

The more I write these lines here, the more I am firm in my belief that Dev is badly off the mark. In a newspaper column on this subject, the omissions will be plenty. What follows then are brief academic notes. I think if Hugo Chavez was alive and ruling Venezuela, his relations with the Third World would not have been infused with factors of race, culture and economic exploitation.
Secondly, the USSR (now Russia) has never been a colonial power, therefore, its relations with the post-colonial world lacked a hegemonic mentality. I was a foreign policy adviser to the Maurice Bishop revolutionary government in Grenada and I can say inflexibly, the USSR had no interest in Grenada and was a reluctant player. The Americans on the other hand, were extraordinarily involved in trying to topple the Grenada Government.

Thirdly, resource transfer from the USSR to Cuba has no match in the American aid to its friendly Third World allies and European countries’ development assistance to the newly independent state. The case of Israel and the USA is an exception but there are two completely different scenarios that have absolutely nothing in common. For decades the USSR bankrolled Cuba to the point where the Cuban economy was dependent on resource transfer from the USSR.

Fourthly, the evolution of the American ideology puts that country in a category by itself among great world powers. The profound distinction between the evolution of the US as a hegemonic power and European imperial reign lies in the way the European state system emerged after the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire.

Perhaps no other book up to this day is better than understanding how Europe emerged in the modern world even though it was written in 1958 is Barrington Moore’s “Social Origin of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the making of the Modern World.” Using the methodology of Marxist class analysis, Moore highlighted the role of the state in mediating class conflict and the role of the state as a protective guide.

In European countries, the state and its obligations are embedded in the national psyche. Perhaps no other distinction between US thinking and European approach to life is the National Health System (NHS) in the UK. To abolish the NHS is to risk certain electoral defeat. The US on the other hand does not assign a socially protective role for the state.

In the US, the ideology is one of rugged individuality where people must fend for themselves and relentlessly pursue the aim of getting rich. American action abroad does not see resource transfer as a policy. This is the opposite to Chinese ideology. China was not a colonial power and its aid policy contradicts Dev’s thesis.

I recommend to you one of the most brilliant analyses of American ideology I have read the past 50 years. It is a Guardian (UK) column of January 29, 2024 titled: “To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer,” by George Monbiot. It contradicts Dev’s thesis in its entirety. Read it Ravi!