Editor's note: Hayat Bangash is a freelance columnist on international affairs with degrees in business administration and war studies. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The crisis in Ukraine has once again brought to the fore a unique imperative of the American ruling elite: stability outside the United States is not always welcome and there must remain some turbulence in some parts of the world to further the interests of this plutocratic class.

One reason for this is geopolitical. Subscribing to one of the foremost thinkers on naval warfare and maritime strategy Alfred Mahan's concepts of sea power, the U.S. attempts to achieve a naval hegemony around the globe. And in pursuit of this hegemony, it pits its perceived rivals in artificial land-based conflicts so that they do not grow to become its challengers.

The other reason is that the financial advantage the American elite accrues from the turbulence that sometimes forms a pretext and sometimes a product of military interventions in foreign lands.

Since the end of U.S. neutrality in the First World War, there has always been a boogeyman that the so-called freedom-loving governments must fight. During the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union, the defeating of which required proxy wars in third countries; during the invasions in the Middle East, it was the undefined terrorists; and today it is the rival great powers, the undermining of which requires a constant flow of weapons into regions around them.

George Friedman, an American geopolitical analyst and forecaster, calls these the actions of a young nation. But there is a method to the madness, involving a complex and self-sustaining system of weapon manufacturers, contractors, lobbyists, and, most worryingly, U.S. government officials.

One modus operandi involves directly invading fledgling nations and using the American military might to break their back. The intent is not always to win in the ensuing war. It is, instead, to create a manageable level of turbulence where the puppet government in the targeted country is hooked to U.S. support for survival without becoming self-sufficient.

Abrupt U.S. withdrawals from the devastated countries leave their governance, economy, and infrastructure in tatters, while Washington absolves all responsibility by stating that nation-building was never the goal. The subsequent governments in the targeted countries are again dependent on foreign – and if things go well, American – support for its survival.

The other modus operandi engineers political unrest, of which history pages are blackened with examples. The unrest leads to insurgencies, then to purchases of American arms for suppressing these insurgencies, and finally to debt traps where a never-ending supply of repayments fuels the American financial system.

The consequence is that the production of industrial capital in the world remains limited. Despite holding massive natural and human potential for industrialization, the countries in which there is intervention cannot break the shackles of underdevelopment owing to external restraints.

They remain engaged in mitigating the effects of instability, whereas the flow of capital into the U.S. enables the growth of the American financial system and, more particularly, the military-industrial complex.

Former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard is presently at the forefront of denouncing the unethical growth of the military-industrial complex. She has gone as far as explicitly accusing the Biden administration of actually wanting Russia to send forces into Ukraine because it is the American war industry that benefits from this.

The corruption and lack of accountability plaguing the American foreign policy establishment and Capitol Hill are equally to blame, as recently explained by Professor Peter Beinart of City University of New York in the New York Times. Officials even in the incumbent U.S. government have been part of consulting firms and think tanks funded by defense contractors. In addition, dozens of Congress members and their spouses own stocks worth millions of dollars in these companies.

It, therefore, does not take much to prove that the American ruling elite has an incentive in planning and executing one military intervention after another.

The benefits of this unethical practice do not stop here. An ecosystem of banks, investors, and other entities also gains as the circulation and redistribution of wealth are enabled by the ensuing economic activity. All this happens at the financial and physical expense of people in countries where there is intervention.

Perhaps this is the biggest disadvantage of leaving everything to unreined market forces and privatizing government responsibilities, including the act of waging war.

It is beyond doubt that the U.S. needs a new economic model where the government steers its foreign and military policy rather than the corporations thriving on turbulence and war. Because in addition to impeding human, social, and infrastructure development in targeted countries, this model is also preventing billions from being spent on the same programs in the U.S.

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