There seems to be an attempt to head off the waxing interest in anti-imperialism by enfolding that discussion into toothless, confusing, or confused discussions of militarism and (unfortunately) declawed versions of racial capitalism

imperialism is a structuring element of capitalism, or accumulation on a world scale. It is the name for the relationship which constitutes countries into hierarchies: dominating/dominated; north/south; core/periphery

That relationship of domination in technical terms is created by value flows, or claims to natural resources, manufactures, and labor, such that wealth concentrated and thereby creates cores/North & is sucked from peripheries/South

The national question, including political and economic sovereignty, is how we frame these issues to make sense of them, with state sovereignty as the shell for resolving internal social contradiction in the periphery

Militarism is an incoherent chimera and stand-in for the actual role of the military in breaking southern sovereignty, ensuring northern technological dominance, and creating a labor elite vested in northern dominance

the flip side is that insistence on solidarity with “peoples” versus states (peoples often want a state to provide water & social security ?) and an equating between Indigenous struggles for decolonization in core and periphery ideologically complements ignorance of national Q

Without the national question to organize our understanding of value flows & as an element of socialist construction, a left armed or disarmed with a hodgepodge of Demi-concepts like militarism, classism, etc will end up again as adjunct to agendas set elsewhere