If you want to understand why the "WWIII is starting tomorrow" might not be the only conceptualization of wars in history, I highly recommend reading this excellent essay by Jeff Rich. He breaks down how our conceptualizations of "world wars" and "peace" are mythologies, arguing instead that we are living in a continuous "sprawling regime of armed peace" maintained through low-level imperial violence in the gray zone. I was also honored to see my own work on the "Bunker State" cited in the piece to help illustrate this dynamic!

However, I have a few theoretical caveats, specifically regarding the relationship between law, ideology, and violence, as well as the dismissal of the Marxist/Leninist timeline of empire:

1. The "Meta-Ideology" of the Ruling Strata Jeff and Benton rightly push back against the idea that imperial violence is just the outworking of an inherent "genocidal Western mindset." However, we cannot discard ideology entirely in favor of legalism and institutions. What exists is a capitalist/colonial meta-ideology (in the Karl Mannheim sense). It is tied to a very specific ruling strata that produced an elite project—partly conscious, partly an unconscious orientation framework—that actively suppressed the non-dichotomous, communal worldviews (and practices) that did and do exist within the Western world. Institutions and laws are built by a ruling strata acting upon the material conditions and meta-ideology of their era.

2. Violence Precedes the Law (The Sequence of Legitimization): The essay leans heavily into the idea that law enabled and conditioned exterminatory violence. But if we look closely, even at the Australian example of the Tasmanian 'Black War,' the sequence is often reversed. First comes the raw, vigilante violence, the lynchings, and the frontier land grabs. The institutional and legalistic pathways are then created retrospectively to legitimize and protect that violence. We see a similar pattern in the US Reconstruction era: vigilante terror preceded the institutionalized legal scaffolding of Jim Crow. The law helps to “launder” the violence.

3. "Organized Violence" vs. Legalistic War: Because of this sequence, I believe focusing too heavily on the "legalistic" sphere of the gray zone is a trap. We should instead view this through the lens of organized violence. Organized violence encompasses the legal and the illegal, the legitimate and the illegitimate, the public state military and the private mercenary or cartel, as well as paramilitaries. The empire relies just as much on outsourced, illegal, organized violence to maintain its "armed peace" as it does on official declarations of martial law.

4. Defending the Timeline of Qualitative Change: Finally, I disagree with the dismissal of Lenin’s core thesis on imperialism. Jeff asks, essentially, if this is the "highest stage," why hasn't it collapsed yet? This assumes history moves on a rapid, human-lifespan timeline. What Marx and Lenin were observing were massive, qualitative changes in social relations and methods of exploitation.

To understand the scale of these qualitative shifts, one example that comes to my mind is pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. In that era, wars and organized violence were not fought to exterminate; they were fought to capture and ritualize. The very weapons they developed were designed to harm and subdue, reflecting a non-dichotomous, communal worldview. (Which doesn’t mean all was great, but the point is about the qualitative change.) The European conquest replaced that with a Manichean, exterminatory meta-ideology. That is a qualitative societal and historical shift we cannot even comprehend for those affected.

Lenin was diagnosing the qualitative shift into global monopoly capital. The reason the imperialist system hasn't collapsed yet is that transition requires the conscious, aware organization of the masses toward a structured alternative. And right now, while embryonic forms of that alternative exist globally, they simply do not yet exist at the scale required to break the imperial cage. In any case: pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.