US forces have attacked the Syrian military, reporting over a hundred deaths. The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is calling the air strike a massacre, a war crime, and a crime against humanity.

The US is an invading, occupying force that is in Syria without the permission of its government, yet it is claiming that the air strike was an act of "self-defense" against an "unprovoked attack" upon the US-backed SDF, a mostly Kurdish militia which had occupied an area of Syrian land. No Americans suffered any injuries or deaths in the attack. The SDF suffered a single reported injury.

It's a bit like saying you broke into someone's house and strangled them from behind with a garotte in self-defense.

Believe it or not, it appears very likely that the US military's latest act of butchery waged upon Middle Easterners on their own land was not about self-defense at all, but about oil. The always insightful Moon of Alabama makes a compelling case that not only is America's version of events full of plot holes, but that the whole thing could very well have been "a trap" to sabotage a local deal that had been made for the SDF to turn over an oil and gas field to the Syrian government in the near future.

This would fit in perfectly with comments Professor Joshua Landis made about the attack, saying that America's plan is to keep Syria weak, poor and divided in order to disadvantage US/Israel/Saudi rivals Iran and Russia. It would also clarify US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's assertion a few weeks ago that thousands of American troops are being kept in Syria to prevent Assad from regaining control of areas that have been liberated from ISIS.

This is what the new imperialism looks like.

When the Russian Federation annexed Crimea in 2014, everyone lost their minds. Countries don't just annex territory from other countries anymore! It's so barbaric! It's so... 20th century.

That's simply not how we do things in the modern world. We don't expand our geopolitical power by blatant land grabs, we expand it with treaties, alliances, intelligence/surveillance deals, trade agreements, corporate contracts, secret pacts, and occupations of key strategic locations under the pretense of fighting terrorism. Like civilized people.

In the old days, an empire would expand itself by invading a weaker territory, killing its people until they gave up, and planting its flag there. We'd change the maps so that everyone could see that the region was now under the control of Rome or the British Crown or Napoleon or whomever, and the power structures would align themselves accordingly. It was all relatively simple and transparent.

The new imperialism doesn't do that. You will never see Syria made into the 51st state.

Since the end of the second World War it has been increasingly taboo for a government to overtly invade a country and add it to that government's official territory, and many international laws were locked into place to reflect that. And yet world power has arguably never been more consolidated than it is right now. The US, the UK, the EU, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Canada, Australia and many other nations tend to march more or less in lockstep with one another on a vast array of subjects ranging from neoliberalism to surveillance to which "regime" is in need of more crushing sanctions on a given day. The alignment isn't perfect, but it's too close to perfect to deny.