Iansá Magazine

By Ja’bril Sunjata

There is a document circulating the halls of empire. They call it the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). Read it carefully. It is not a blueprint for renewal. It is a death warrant—signed by the dying, addressed to the expendable.

Do not be deceived by its sterile lexicon. This is not isolationism; this is triage. A wounded beast abandoning peripheral kills to guard its last meal. The ruling class knows what it cannot say aloud: the American century is over. What remains is theft—stealing the present because they cannot win the future. For the Black and Indigenous diasporic word, this is not a new strategy. It is the old colonial covenant, solemnized for an era of collapse. It designates our hemisphere a plantation and our people its chattel.

The ancestors knew this moment would come. Every empire that feasts on the flesh of others eventually consumes itself in the end.

I. The Soviet Reflection

To understand Washington’s gambit, look at Moscow’s finale. The USSR of 1980 and the USA of 2025 are fraternal twins separated ideologically but united by terminal architecture: military overreached masking productive decay; stagnant living standards papered over by extraction (oil rents then, financialization now); ideological exhaustion so total the ruling class no longer believes its own myths.

The Soviets had one Afghanistan. We have a dozen—Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and 750 military bases bleeding capital across 80 countries. Their rival was us. Our rival is China.

And China occupies the structural position of mid-century America: industrial dynamism in its factories, civilizational-scale infrastructure constructed by freshly-diplomaed engineers, technological leapfrogging in various key sectors, and an ideology of pragmatic confidence that permeates society writ large. China lifted four hundred million people from poverty in forty years while American living standards stagnated (and now, rapidly degrade). High-speed rail connecting cities, towns, and villages while American bridges collapse. This is not Sinophilic propaganda, this is material fact. The question is not if the American order will fall, but what rises from its ashes—and who builds it.

II. The Family as Prison & Factory

Watch what they attack: “DEI,” “gender ideology,” “wokeness.” These are not mere culture wars, this is class war as it has always been: racialized and gendered. As the state shreds whatever remains of the social safety net—healthcare, education, retirement—and it resurrects the patriarchal family as society’s shock absorber and primary cell-block. Your household becomes the forced retreat for capitalism’s manifold crises. Your grandmother’s care, your child’s education, your cousin’s medical debt—all privatized onto kitchen tables already groaning under the weight.

The family they defend is not a haven, it is a factory that produces workers, soldiers, and obedience. It naturalizes the hierarchy that the empire requires: men over women, straight over queer, white over Black, the core over the periphery. This is not about protecting “tradition,” it is about manufacturing consent for austerity.

This is the domestic core of imperial logic. The same discipline that says “know your place” to a Black worker in Alabama enforces “know your place” to a nation sitting on lithium in Bolivia. Racial patriarchy is not a veil over political economy—it is the connective tissue connecting extraction abroad to control at home.

III. Fictitious Futures

They promise reindustrialization and an AI salvation. These are pure lies. 
The “AI revolution” is not an industrial renaissance; it is a state-sponsored gamble on automated surveillance and labor discipline subsidized by public debt. The server farms will be powered by sacrifice zones, hardwiring environmental racism into policy for generations.

And the dollar’s spell is breaking. Washington’s weaponization of tariffs is accelerating its abandonment. BRICS+ nations are building alternative financial rails. When China restricted rare-earth exports in 2025, it wasn’t just a trade dispute—it was a revelation of profound vulnerability. The panic that followed was palpable, but the message it communicated to the racially-colonized was even more so: they need our materials more than we need their chains.

IV. The Hemispheric Plantation

The Strategy’s most brazen element is its cartography of plunder. The “Don-roe Doctrine” formally declares the Western Hemisphere an American plantation: a zone for resource extraction, political domination, and coerced labor. This is not metaphor; it is policy.

Intelligence agencies are tasked with “identify[ing] strategic points and resources” for U.S. corporations to seize. Venezuela’s oil. Brazil’s iron. Argentina’s lithium. Bolivia’s minerals. Embassies become forward scouts for capital penetration, spotting “strategic acquisitions” like overseeings surveying new fields. “Nearshoring” means supply chains moving to Mexico or Colombia not to rebuild Michigan, but to exploit cheaper labor where repression is easier. It is super-exploitation by geography.

The mine shaft and the missile silo are the same structure. One extracts, the other enforces. Sovereignty seals both. For the Black diaspora, this architecture is not new—it is the circuit completed. From the prison corridors of Angola, Louisiana, to the coltan mines of the Congo, the same logic operates: bodies marked as extractable, labor marked as disposable, land marked for seizure. The hemisphere becomes a cell-block. The globe, a tiered plantation.

V. Encirclement Cannot Hold

China is the target. Everyone in Washington knows it. But here is what they cannot admit: they have already lost.

The Pentagon’s own war games say so. In 2023, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) ran twenty-four simulations of a Taiwan conflict. In most simulations, America and its allies “won”—at the cost of dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, tens of thousands of soldiers, and Taiwan reduced to ruin. In 2025, CSIS conducted a follow-up, “Lights Out?” wherein twenty-six simulations were conducted, but “did not assign winners or losers” this time around. It did say, however, that so-called “successful campaigns” would “exact heavy casualties” that would be a “shock” to a United States that has grown accustomed to “fighting wars with few personnel or weapons losses.”

So, the strategy pivots to economic strangulation. Chip bans. Supply chain decoupling. Attempts to fracture the Beijing-Moscow partnership. But China already demonstrated not only that they hold all the cards, but that the cards are made in China. So, decoupling is not independence—it is amputation. Meanwhile, Europe is converted to tributary status. Pay for NATO. Buy American. Forgo sovereignty.  Africa receives three paragraphs in a thirty-three page document—all dedicated to “harnessing natural resources.” Drawers of water, hewers of wood.

The border wall, the prison wall, the military base perimeter–one continuous architecture of captivity.

V. The Five Fronts of Refusal

The blueprint for managed decline can only be met with total, systemic negation. The forces capable of meting out this militant rejection of the status quo do not share identity, but position—those whose labor, land, or bodies are marked for sacrifice.

1. Internationalist working-class solidarity: Transform the supply line from an artery of empire into a chorus line of refusal-—the picket line stretching from port to plantation, from warehouse to mine. Link dockworkers in Los Angeles with maquiladora workers in Juárez and frustrate the shared enemy.
2. Anti-colonial resource sovereignty: True sovereignty seals shut both the mine shaft and the missile silo. Support resource nationalization. Challenge corporate courts like the ISDS that sidestep popular accountability and override democraticatic sovereignty. Demand reparations by grounding extraction history to present claims.
3. Abolish the carceral-imperialist state: The border wall, the prison wall, and the military base perimeter are one continuous architecture. To abolish one is to target the keystone of all. Close overseas bases. Redirect police and military budgets to housing, healthcare, and education. Demilitarize borders and regularize migration as a labor right.
4. Abolish the racial patriarchy: Dismantle the factory-family and build the commune of uncoerced care. Institute universal child and eldercare. Distribute wages for reproductive labor and establish a social wage decoupled from unemployment. Full reproductive autonomy—abortion as a positive and negative right, trans healthcare, bodily self-determination.
5. Democratic control of technology and energy: The server farm and the solar farm must answer to the same assembly—the people who power them and the people they (em)power. National or municipalize critical AI infrastructure developed with renewable resources. Data as commons: break surveillance monopolies, establish democratic data trusts. Guarantee a just transition for every displaced worker.

The force to build this new world shares a condition: the marked, the mined, and the monitored. The dockworker who refuses to load weapons bound for genocide. The nurse who demands higher wages for care work the economy depends on, but refuses to value. The indigenous water protector who blocks the pipeline because the land remembers what the law forgets. The prisoner who organizes inside because abolition begins where captivity is most complete. The tech worker who leaks the algorithm because even the engineers can see the cage built around them. 

These are not separate movements, but a single front against a single, crumbling leviathan.

VII. Final Hour

The Soviet Union had six years between its final strategy and its dissolution. We may have even fewer than that.

The NSS offers managed decline: a tightening noose presented as a neck brace, a shrinking circle of protection that excludes ever more of humanity. They will sacrifice the periphery to save the core. They will sacrifice the poor to save the rich. They will sacrifice the future to extend the present.

Against this backdrop, we seek not reform, but replacement. Not better management of empire, but its demolition.

True security will never be drafted in the war rooms of the Pentagon. It will be forged in the streets, coded in the communes, and ratified by those designated as human ore for a dying empire.

Iansá dances in the sky with the wind. She commands the storm that clears the air. She is change itself—fierce, urgent, and necessary.

The hour is late. The covenant is broken.

Shatter it completely. Seize the ruins. Rebuild the world.