This final chapter addresses the role of imperialist war in denying sovereignty to the Arab working masses and thereby sustaining a cheapened valuation of Arab resources for the purposes of metropolitan capital accumulation. The wars visited upon the AW are not an accident of history unrelated to the necessities of world capital. Carved up and remoulded by the continued practice of colonialism, imperialist aggression and re- colonisation, the AW represents an outstanding manifestation of permanent war theory (Luxemburg 1913; Lenin 1916). Oil in its raw form, together with the value of imperial rents wrought from its strategic control, represents a decisive constituent of the global accumulation process. US- led capital's control of oil by means of violence sustains its rate of expropriation and the stature of the US empire. As such, the articulation of the Arab social formation with US- led imperialism – the capitalist class cutting across national boundaries – issues from USled hegemony and from wars of encroachment to seize the assets of the Arab region. To redress the declining contribution to the circuit of capital arising as a result of autonomous working classes retaining more of the value they created, US- led imperialism and its class allies regularly resort to military aggression. Militarism boosts war- related technological development and financial expansion – and heightens the rates of dispossession cum devalorisation of insecure social formations, in particular, Arab formations. Hence, as Mao Zedong (1938) might have put it in today's context: the AW is articulated with world capital by the barrel of the gun. What the necessity of war to imperialism implies for Arab development is that imperialist belligerence or the serious threat thereof can result in the collapse of the state as a potential medium for working- class representation in the international political order. So far, where war is not already completely ravaging society, poor development outcomes of the neo- liberal genre characterise Arab development.

In this concluding chapter, I address some aspects of the combined condition of war cum botched Arab development as the necessary product of imperialist aggression qua permanent war. With Israel and the IS in the process of constructing ethnically pure states, effacing internationally recognised borders and flouting the conventions of the international security arrangement, the threats emanating from the region implicate the entire planet.