or use it for joint imperial aims when they do.

The world's most powerful governments don't deploy the UN for the benefit of exploited and oppressed people--as the UN's record in Haiti proves beyond a shadow of a doubt. The ongoing UN occupation has repressed the popular movement, introduced cholera to the country via occupation forces, aided and abetted predatory sweatshop development and betrayed promises to reconstruct Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010.

NATO, meanwhile, is the gendarme of U.S. domination over Europe--and increasingly throughout the entire world, as the alliance's use in Afghanistan demonstrated. The EU became a vehicle for the neoliberal restructuring of Europe's capitalist order, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Recession, when draconian austerity was imposed on Greece and other countries in its name.

Eventhe Marshall Plan after the Second World War--which Sanders points to as an example of Washington's past benevolence--proves the imperial nature of the American state.

After the Second World War and at the start of the Cold War, the U.S. paired this plan with the Truman Doctrine to rebuild capitalism in Europe, defend its section of the continent as a sphere of influence against the USSR and its Eastern Bloc, and repress revolution from below, as in Greece.

U.S. imperialism has always used every foreign policy lever it possesses--from "humanitarian" aid to alliances with brutal dictatorships to launching outright wars--to defend and project American capitalist interests.

LEAVING ASIDE Sanders' fanciful recollections of U.S. imperialism's past, in the present, he argues for diplomacy to take precedence over military force. On the surface,