Under Jaff’s proposal, the Pentagon would not need a draft when economic conditions could make enlistment the rational choice for millions of people who had no hand in engineering those conditions.
The debt proposal is not the only instrument this strategic vision has produced.
Self-determination as imperial weapon
The ICJ affirmed in its 2004 Advisory Opinion that the right of peoples to self-determination has an erga omnes character. In its 2024 Advisory Opinion on Israel’s policies and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the Court further held that, in cases of foreign occupation, the right to self-determination constitutes a peremptory norm of international law, or jus cogens.
Yet the architects of this proposal have spent seven decades watching Security Council resolutions on Palestine and Kashmir gather dust, dismissing liberation struggles as terrorism when their success threatened strategic interests, and treating the principle as a procedural inconvenience rather than a binding obligation.
Now they propose to deploy that same principle as an instrument of partition against a sovereign state they need to dismember.
The record is specific and verifiable. Fourteen Security Council resolutions on Kashmir remain unimplemented since 1948.
The US has used its Security Council position to obstruct resolutions on Palestinian statehood and ceasefire with a consistency that spans administrations, parties, and decades.
The US designated the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine a terrorist organisation in 1997. Jaff now proposes that Congress recognise the independence of minorities within Iranian territory as a coercive instrument of partition, not because Washington’s position on liberation movements has changed, but because the geography has.
Jaff’s proposal deploys the language of minority recognition and liberation as an instrument of imperial partition when it serves the dismemberment of a resistant state, while contrasting with the denial of the same language to Palestinians and Kashmiris whose liberation threatens the territorial integrity of allied states.
It is the international order functioning as designed.
That a proposal invoking the language of minority liberation to serve the logic of imperial partition appears without caveat or editorial distance in an establishment publication of a state whose founding required the displacement of another people’s self-determination, and whose government has spent the last three years arguing before international courts that Palestinian statehood cannot be recognised while simultaneously prosecuting a war that has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, is not a new low in strategic thinking.
It is strategic thinking finally dispensing with the pretence that the principle was ever meant to apply universally.
Taken together, Jaff’s two proposals answer a question that strategic discourse has never stated so plainly: that the bodies of economically precarious young Americans and the identities of minority peoples in resistant states are resources to be allocated, discharged, or recognised according to the needs of imperial power.
Related
What has changed is not the logic but the candour, a candour that signals the project no longer requires the consent, the silence, or even the ignorance of the people it is built upon.
That it required a state whose accumulated conduct across Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran has progressively dismantled every threshold of restraint for strategic discourse to reach this level of candour about who counts as raw material and who counts as sovereign is itself the measure of how far that threshold has moved.
The question is not whether the proposal is morally wrong. That was settled before it was published.
The real question is whether the international institutions, the allied governments, and the publics whose taxes fund these wars will continue to extend to this project the diplomatic cover, the legal abstention, and the studied silence that have made each successive escalation possible, or whether the candour that produced this proposal will finally produce the reckoning it has made unavoidable.