by Henry De Groot explores Trump’s regional imperialist turn in terms of a strategic retreat by the United States capitalist class in the face of a rising China, and the fight between productive capital and finance capital.
Neoliberal Crash Out; America First Crash Course
At the end of November, the Trump administration released their new National Security Strategy, which calls for a fundamental recalibration of the foreign policy objectives of US imperialism.
The liberal-neoliberal wing of the establishment media immediately had a freakout. For The Atlantic, the strategy was ‘incoherent babble.’ That outlet, which represents itself as progressive and forward thinking but is actually run by a hard-core Zionist, pined for the days when national security strategy was dragged by great intellectuals, like war criminal Henry Kissinger.
The Center For Strategic and International Studies, perhaps the most influential foreign policy think tank, called it “short-sighted.” And The Economist, the magazine which Marx described as, “the European organ of the aristocracy of finance,” ran an article titled The Donroe Delusion as its most recent cover story. Trump, the open imperialist, at odds with the polite imperialists of the world.
But for Marxists, it is dangerous to write off Trump and his administration as either ideologically zealous, or functionally incompetent. Of course, the Trump team are incompetent zealots, but not only; and it’s not impossible that these two factors do explain much of what goes on in Trump land. But Marxism teaches us to not take ideology at face value, but instead to understand ideology as a tool for the pursuit of material interests, and to always ask “Qui bono?” Who benefits?
More than that, Marxism also gives us the economic framework for understanding the structural forces which undergird disputes between factions of the ruling class. Socialists who are serious about understanding Trump’s brand of imperialism, its relationship with Trump’s America First Ideology and his MAGA movement, and what tasks and opportunities it poses for anti-imperialists must apply the methods of scientific socialism, applying an analysis independent from the neoliberals.
Since work began on this article, Trump executed his bold kidnapping operation targeting the president of Venezuela, taking Maduro and his wife hostage, and killing some 115 persons in the process. And before we could finish edits, he launched a new round of tariffs on European states with the expressed intention of acquiring Greenland for the United States, and then reversed them before we could go to press, requiring a subsequent edit. The explicit call to revive the Monroe Doctrine, laid out in that November document, has been realized in short order. But as Trump makes peace with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, who seems ready to open the country to US oil extraction, while stoking new tension in the Arctic, Trump’s machinations only add more questions and make clear that not all is as it seems. These last weeks have been a crash course in Trump’s new orientation to world affairs, and we’d all better study up.
Summarizing Trump’s New National Security Strategy
The document begins by posing the question of strategy in general, positing that
The questions before us now are: 1) What should the United States want? 2) What are our available means to get it? and 3) How can we connect ends and means into a viable National Security Strategy?
The National Security Strategy explicitly critiques and calls for a break with the previous globalist order, holding that in the old strategy
Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest. They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend. They allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own. And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.
In place, it highlights the need for state sovereignty, a strong national economy, the revitalization of manufacturing, and securing of the defense industrial base.
Notably, the document explicitly develops the idea of a revived dominance of US hegemony over the American continents.
We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
In the Western Hemisphere,
The United States will prioritize commercial diplomacy, to strengthen our own economy and industries, using tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools. The goal is for our partner nations to build up their domestic economies, while an economically stronger and more sophisticated Western Hemisphere becomes an increasingly attractive market for American commerce and investment.
Strengthening critical supply chains in this Hemisphere will reduce dependencies and increase American economic resilience. The linkages created between America and our partners will benefit both sides while making it harder for nonHemispheric competitors to increase their influence in the region.
The document goes on to discuss the importance of counter foreign influence (read: China) in the Western Hemisphere.
The document also highlights the importance of energy policy.
Energy Dominance – Restoring American energy dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) and reshoring the necessary key energy components is a top strategic priority. Cheap and abundant energy will produce well-paying jobs in the United States, reduce costs for American consumers and businesses, fuel reindustrialization, and help maintain our advantage in cutting-edge technologies such as AI. Expanding our net energy exports will also deepen relationships with allies while curtailing the influence of adversaries, protect our ability to defend our shores, and—when and where necessary—enables us to project power. We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.
Even though the US is currently an energy exporter, the administration highlights the importance of expanded energy dominance for self-reliance, re-industrialization, and advancing artificial intelligence.
And the document also highlights the importance of investing in capital markets
Preserving and Growing America’s Financial Sector Dominance – The United States boasts the world’s leading financial and capital 15 markets, which are pillars of American influence that afford policymakers significant leverage and tools to advance America’s national security priorities. But our leadership position cannot be taken for granted. Preserving and growing our dominance entails leveraging our dynamic free market system and our leadership in digital finance and innovation to ensure that our markets continue to be the most dynamic, liquid, and secure and remain the envy of the world
We will return to these ideas to consider how they relate to Trump’s focus on the Western Hemisphere.
The document also addresses Asian, European, the Middle East, and African priorities. For our purposes, we will keep their summarization short.
For China, the strategy calls for reducing the negative impacts of the Chinese economy, and avoiding military conflict. Specifically, the document argues that maintaining conventional military advantage can deter military confrontation. To pursue this,
We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain. But the American military cannot, and should not have to, do this alone. Our allies must step up and spend—and more importantly do—much more for collective defense. America’s diplomatic efforts should focus on pressing our First Island Chain allies and partners to allow the U.S. military greater access to their ports and other facilities, to spend more on their own defense, and most importantly to invest in capabilities aimed at deterring aggression. This will interlink maritime security issues along the First Island Chain while reinforcing U.S. and allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible
For Europe, the strategy highlights the need for Europeans to increase their self-sufficiency in terms of defense.
In the Middle East, the document points out the reduced importance of Middle Eastern oil, and the possibility of the US reducing their emphasis on that region.
In Africa, the strategy calls for the replacement of aid with the pursuit of investments in energy and critical minerals.
In addition to materialist appeals, the document contains a number of references to the culture war, for example the revival of European culture. These should not be understood as a genuine part of the strategy, but as rhetorical devices and political rhetoric with a utilitarian purpose, rather than genuinely held beliefs or objectives.
US NATO Strategy: Containing Communism or Securing Markets?
In order to understand Trump’s pivot to a new national security strategy, it is necessary to accurately understand the real economic and strategic underpinnings of the previous world order. We cannot understand the logic of what is new without understanding the logic of what came before.
Benjamin Schwarz’ article “‘Cold War’ Continuities: US Economic and Security Strategy toward Europe,” (originally published in Journal of Strategic Studies Vol 17, No 4 (December 1994) and later republished in Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War from Verso Books) does an excellent job explaining this strategy. Schwarz argues that US NATO policy during the Cold War was not primarily about Soviet containment, but rather about securing open markets for US corporations. This required providing (or over-providing) for German and Japanese security interests to avoid them developing their own security capabilities, which would have had the secondary impact of promoting nationalist over internationalist economics (see below).
The argument is complicated but crucial to understanding the real role of NATO. Therefore, we quote at length from Schwarz.
In the normal course of world politics, therefore, international economic interdependence is impossible to achieve. As political economist Robert Gilpin remarks, ‘what today we call international economic interdependence runs so counter to the great bulk of human experience that only extraordinary changes and novel circumstances could have led to its innovation and triumph over other means of economic exchange.’ In fact, as historians Immanuel Wallerstein and Thomas McCormick point out, international capitalism has enjoyed only two golden ages: the periods following the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars. The key to both of these episodes of peace and prosperity has been the same: the ability and will of a single state to play the role of hegemonic power. The only way to overcome the dangers inherent to international capitalism is for a preponderant power to take care of other states’ security problems for them, so that they need not pursue autarkic policies or form trading blocs in attempts to improve their relative positions. This suspension of international politics through hegemony has been the fundamental aim of US foreign policy since 1945; the real story of that policy is not the thwarting of the Soviet ‘threat,’ but rather the effort to impose a specific economic vision on a recalcitrant world.
After World War II Washington policymakers recognized that only the United States could achieve the prerequisite for an open world economy -ensuring that Germany and Japan were revitalized as engines of world economic growth, while simultaneously assuaging Western Europe’s and Asia’s fears about German and Japanese economic, military and political dominance. Thus, Washington committed itself to building and maintaining an international political order based upon an American ‘preponderance of power’. By providing for Germany’s and Japan’s security and by enmeshing their military and foreign policies into alliances that it dominated, the United States contained its erstwhile enemies, preventing its ‘partners’ from embarking upon independent policies. This stabilized relations among the states of Western Europe and East Asia, for by controlling Germany and Japan, the United States ‘reassured’ their neighbors that these most powerful allies would remain pacific. NATO and the US-Japan Alliance, by banishing power politics and nationalist rivalries, protected the states of Western Europe and East Asia from themselves.
Freed from the fears and competitions that had for centuries kept them nervously looking over their shoulders, the West Europeans (and East Asians) were able to cooperate politically and economically. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued in 1967: ‘The presence of our forces in Europe under NATO has also contributed to the development of intra-European cooperation … But without the visible assurance of a sizeable American contingent, old frictions may revive, and Europe could become unstable once more.’ From that perspective, restoring Europe to its prewar status risked destroying America’s grand design. What Kennan saw as the return to the normal power balance on the Continent seemed to most other American statesmen to be a return to the international political and economic fragmentation of the 1930s. It was, after all, an independent Western Europe that had toppled the Pax Britannica and its beneficent global economic order. Recognizing that Europe and East Asia could not be left to their own devices in the post-Cold War world, Washington pursued not Kennan’s vision of balance and diversity, but hegemony. This preponderance ensured the tranquil world environment in which an open economic system could operate…
The fundamental purpose behind America’s ‘Cold War’ policy had little to do with containing the Soviet Union, even though the Soviet threat was used to justify that policy to a nationalist public and Congress (a strategy described by Senator Arthur Vandenberg as ‘scaring hell out of the American people’ to secure an internationalist agenda). The Kremlin’s irrelevance to America’s postwar planning was acknowledged in NSC-68, the National Security Council’s 1950 blueprint for America’s Cold War strategy, which defined the security policy it advocated ‘as one designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.’ This ‘policy of attempting to develop a healthy international community’, NSC-68’s authors went on to assert, was ‘a policy which we would probably pursue even if there was no Soviet threat’….
The apparent connections among the requirements of an international capitalist economy, America’s economic well-being, and its defense commitments have been repeated so often that Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, conflated the supposed dictates of prosperity with those of national security in announcing the administration’s new foreign policy doctrine in September 1993. Explaining that ‘the expansion of market-based economies abroad helps expand our exports and create American jobs’, Lake declared that America’s new ‘security mission’ is the ‘enlargement of the world’s community of market democracies’.
The now infamous draft of the Pentagon’s classified ‘post-Cold War’ Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), which gave the public an unprecedented glimpse into the thinking that informs America’s defense strategy when it was leaked in March 1992, merely restates in somewhat undiplomatic language the logic behind America’s ‘Cold War’ reassurance strategy. Arguing that American preponderance as a security blanket is essential for stability in Europe and East Asia, the DPG stated that the United States must therefore ‘discourage the advanced industrialized nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role’. To accomplish this, America must do nothing less than ‘retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing . . . those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations’. The United States, in other words, must provide what one of the DPG’s authors termed ‘adult supervision’. It must protect the interests of virtually all potential great powers for them so that they need not acquire the capabilities to protect themselves, that is, so that they need not. act like great powers. The very existence of truly independent actors would be intolerable to the United States, for it would disrupt American hegemony, the key to a stable world….
That line of reasoning – that if a hegemon must ensure the stability of a region on which it apparently depends, it must also secure those areas on which that region depends – nicely illustrates what historian Paul Kennedy calls ‘imperial overstretch’. If America must guarantee the stability of a potentially unstable Europe, then logic seemingly dictates that it must guard against instability that could infect Europe.
This thinking, so reminiscent of the Cold War domino theory, suggests that the logic of economic interdependence leads to a proliferation of American ‘security’ commitments in an unstable new world order. An imperial strategy is necessarily expansive. With awkward syntax, the authors of NSC-68 asserted in 1950 that America’s freedom and welfare can only be secured through ‘the virtual abandonment by the United States of trying to distinguish national from global security’ and that, therefore, ‘it is not an adequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of World leadership.’43 In 1993 the same logic compelled Lugar to argue that the United States must make itself responsible for the stability of all of Eurasia, since ‘there can be no lasting security at the center without security at the periphery.’ While such assessments sound excessive, they in fact reflect the imperial thinking upon which America’s security strategy – during and after the Cold War – rests.
In this light, we can better understand the real role of NATO in the post-war and post-Cold War periods – the securing of open markets for the United States corporations.
This strategy was based on the superiority of US industrial capitalism, providing it an ability to compete successfully and dominantly in “fair” open market competition. But what happens when the United States loses its edge in open market competition?
The Economic Threat From China And Its Consequences
The Chinese economy has developed rapidly into an economic rival to the American economy. This has forced the US to reconsider the above strategy, which was based on securing open markets.
The Chinese economy has grown some 50 fold over the last 35 years. It is the second largest national economy by nominal GDP and the largest by purchasing power parity – its national economy is only slightly smaller than the entire European Union. It is the single largest exporter, the second largest importer, and the largest trading partner for some 120 countries. It is the world’s largest manufacturer, dominating in virtually every field of heavy manufacturing, and increasingly competitive or already leading in critical technologies including artificial intelligence, robotics/drones, and electric vehicles/batteries. It also has a virtual monopoly on the sourcing and/or production of the key raw inputs of the 21st century, including graphite and rare earths.
Through a combination of strong state subsidization, national planning, foreign investment, technology transfer, and abundant labor, Chinese commodity production is increasingly able to compete and win in international markets. As we noted in the article “Electric Vehicles And the New Cold War,” (R&R Magazine Issue #16: Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo) Chinese industry has continued to up-skill substantially, moving from an earlier dominance in labor-intensive industries like textile production, into advanced capitalist production, including electric vehicles and artificial intelligence.
If the purpose of US subsidization of NATO was to secure open markets in Europe and East Asia, and the purpose of securing open markets was to secure the prosperity of international-facing US corporations, then China’s increased economic competitiveness undermines the financial logic of this situation.
Whereas open markets were for the benefit of US capitalism, US capitalism now requires protection from Chinese competition, and therefore the US state moves to replace neoliberal free trade with protectionism.
And a parallel reversal of the earlier logic develops in the military field. The earlier US-NATO orientation had the goal of lowering European and Japanese military spending. But if the United States and China are increasingly facing off in a New Cold War (see The New Cold War?: The Growing Inter-Imperialist Conflict and The Changing Crisis Of Neoliberalism, R&R Magazine Issue #15: The New Cold War?) then would the United States not actually prefer European and Japanese increases in military spending?
On the military field we see the threat from China also reverses the earlier military formulation: US military spending to suppress German/Japanese military development was the cost of securing open markets – but now – closed markets are the cost of securing increased German/Japanese military spending. Since the Ukraine war we have seen more than a one-third increase in German defense jobs, and since then German military-industrial stocks have soared as the dispute over Greenland has escalated.
The original Monroe Doctrine and its subsequent development was based on the growing power of the United States, which enabled it to evolve from the local domination of westward expansion to the regional domination of the Western Hemisphere. But that regional domination was long-ago eclipsed by the global domination made possible through and after World War Two and peaking after the fall of the USSR. The return to regional domination is not a result of the strengthening of the US, but the opposite; the Trump Corollary is an ordered retreat of US capitalism from global domination back to regional domination. The two are identical in the same way that an ascending and a descending elevator will pass by the same floor – in other words – identical in position, but opposite in trajectory.
The America First Coalition
The challenge from China, the retreat from the goal of securing international markets, and the pursuit of protectionism are not only carried out by the US system as a whole, but also coincide with and are the result of the emergence (or re-emergence) of an alternative coalition of capitalists, who displace the earlier leading group of capitalists.
As we have explored previously (see: Crisis in the Atlantic Order: Revisiting Kees Van der Pijl in the Age of Trump, R&R Issue #18: Workers, Arts, and Oligarchs), Marxist economists have long explored the division between two fundamental fractions of capital – finance capital and productive capital, and their larger political tendencies, the liberal-internationalist tendency, and the state-monopolist tendency.
The neoliberal rules-based order, with a focus on open markets, the free flow of capital, and low inflation, was the system of finance capital and its liberal-internationalist tendency. It was this tendency which benefited the most from the previous system. But the forward march of this system was massively undermined by the Great Financial Crisis, and the Neoliberal plan to counter China was blocked with the defeat of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
With US capitalism under threat in the face of a rising China, a new solution to the threat was needed. It was into this void that the productive-capital fraction (those directly invested in the production of commodities, as opposed to the financial capitalists who might lend them and/or their competitors money) was able to put together its bid for a new ‘concept of control,’ on productive capital based in the US domestic economy, which, despite some deindustrialization, remained tremendously large. This fraction is undergirded by organizations like The Coalition for a Prosperous America, a lobbying group which includes national manufacturers like the steel and metalworking industries, as well as unions including the Teamsters and the IFPTE, which represents workers at GE, Boeing, Westinghouse, and General Dynamic. In March of 2025, Bloomberg wrote that some of the “most vocal outside intellectual support for Trump’s tariffs comes” from the The Coalition for a Prosperous America.
It is worth remembering that Trump built his momentum in the 2016 Republican primary primarily by appealing to rust-belt workers hurt by bad trade deals and through his criticism of NAFTA and the TPP. And Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor, was a relatively unknown academic and failed municipal politician until he gained fame for his works highlighting the economic threat from China. His book Death By China, was made into a 2012 documentary narrated by Martin Sheen with funding from Nucor Steel,1 a member of The Coalition for A Prosperous America and the nation’s largest steel producer.2 Early in the first Trump term, the eccentric professor Navarro was taken under the wing of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the three of whom put forward a hardline America First line as against the more traditional Republicans who still held sway in that older version of the Republican movement.3
While Trump has since expanded his coalition, the national-productive element has remained at the core of his coalition, tied in as it is with the might of American industry, the defense-industrial complex, and the blue-collar workers Trump claims to represent.
Making Monroe Doctrine Make Sense
Trump’s Monroe Doctrine may be the result of a weakened rather than a strengthened US imperialism. But that is not how it will feel in Latin America.
Rather, and as we have already seen, the retreat from a globally-expansive to a regionally-focused US imperialism means the concentration of imperialist violence on South and Central America. And while the rules-based global order acts as a restraint – to a certain degree – on state violence to avoid retaliation, the productive capital-driven embrace of monopolistic, sphere of influence imperialism frees these guardrails on state violence, facilitating further interventionism. (Although it is worth reminding ourselves that Clinton, Bush, and Obama also funded violent, escalatory, and illegal interventions, challenging the liberal nostalgia for a ‘peaceful rules based order.’)
Much of this violence is driven by resource extraction. Productive capital needs guaranteed resources to reshore US manufacturing, while the military-industrial complex needs to secure the inputs for 21st century warfare.
In the most obvious instance, it is crucial that energy costs be kept low to facilitate the AI arms race, run the factories, and provide the diesel which fuels the trucks and trains which are the lifeblood of domestic manufacturing, while keeping gas prices low to limit domestic discontent. And perhaps most importantly, securing a regional source of energy also frees up the United States economy to act more aggressively in the Middle East. In case of another escalation in the Middle East, as is brewing again with regards to Iran, regional oil sourcing gives the United States far greater leeway, not because the United States needs Middle Eastern oil, but because US oil producers sell on the international market at the market price, affecting the price of gas and diesel for consumers and businesses at home.
But perhaps even more important than oil are the rare earth metals that enable the AI arms race and the expansion of the weaponized drones which are already redefining warfare. The ‘Lithium Triangle,’ in the mountains of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, contains some 50 percent of the world’s lithium, a key input for the batteries necessary to power not only electric cars but electrified machines of war. In a New Cold War, the US war machine not only desperately needs these resources, but also cannot allow China to have them. Already, the People’s Liberation Army operates a number of ‘non-military’ sites in Latin America, including China’s Deep Space Radar in Neuquen, Argentina, as well as signal intelligence facilities in Cuba.4 That helps to explain why the US was willing to extend such a sizable loan to Javier Millei’s government just before his re-election bid.
In jostling for resources and for influence over the governments which control them, Trump’s new hemispheric-focused imperialism means not only a more blatant and direct re-colonization of Central and South America, but also the revival of Latin America as once again a site of contestation between ‘East’ and ‘West.’
And if productive capital, with military-industrial characteristics, is in the saddle, hemispheric hegemony is also securing opportunities for finance capital. The export of US capital, including by propping up the Argentinian state (and holders of its government bonds) under Millei, and bankrolling massive investments in Venezeulan drilling infrastructure are just two examples of Trump’s Monroe doctrine opening up outlets for creditors, helping to replace the markets curtailed by the retreat from neoliberal globalism.
What the new Monroe Doctrine is not about is some ideological fight for ideologies’ sake – this isn’t about old Cold War ideological rivalries, but business. That helps explain why Trump’s administration has so far seemed far more willing to work with Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s Vice President and now the acting interim president, than to install Maria Corina Machado, the neoliberal heir-apparent.5 Because ideology matters little as long as the oil and the profits flow.
Trump’s push for Greenland, on the other hand, was not all that it appeared or that the Monroe Doctrine, read literally, would imply. If the Monroe Doctrine is about exerting absolute hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, it would be consistent for the US to take Greenland to exert control over resources and station military forces, right? Except the United States already has the ability to mine in Greenland, and has far less troops stationed there than the 10,000 which the US had on the Arctic island during the height of the Cold War.6 Trump does not need annexation to secure economic or military concessions, at least, not the ones he claims to be pursuing.
Instead, it is helpful to understand the Greenland push by looking at the real impact. With Trump threatening the north, European countries (and Canada) are brought to the negotiating table, where they are pushed to increase their military spending. Trump’s blustering threats also provide European leaders the rhetorical opportunity to present increases in military spending as counter US imperialism, even though such increases actually mean bearing more of the cost of the military alliance led by the United States. Would these leaders have such an easy time passing record increases in military spending if it seemed like they were doing it in lock-step with Trump?
It would have been a dangerous game to write off the possibility of Trump moving on Greenland entirely, or indeed, in the future. But so far the result has been – if you look beyond statements and vibes – the further investment by European members in NATO. And that result, which secures a goal explicitly and consistently expressed by Trump, tracks directly with the larger strategic need for the US to withdraw from the hyper-subsidization of Europe in order to free up resources to confront China.
As Frank McKenna, former Canadian ambassador to the United States, noted in a quote in the Financial Times,
Despite the ‘existential threat,’ Trump’s policies could be seen positively as they sparked government spending on infrastructure projects [and] increased military capabilities…
And that article followed up, noting that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has “pledged to raise defence spending by C$8.1bn (US$5.8bn) over the next five years to comply with Trump’s demand that Nato spends 2 per cent of GDP on defence by 2032.”
Fighting Back In This Hemisphere and Beyond
Hopefully it is evident to the reader that Trump’s pivot is a radical shift from an earlier imperialist model to a new one.
To keep pace with events and to make sense of them, it is necessary to strip off ideology or bluster, and follow closely the actual decisions and agreements that are being made. Furthermore, by studying this pivot more carefully, asking always who stands to benefit from these changes, and exploring texts like The Making Of The Atlantic Ruling Class which explore similar shifts in the past, we can develop a stronger context to understand the deeper rooted material interests that push towards Trump’s strategy. Hand-wringing about the size of Trump’s ego and mental illness, or tears shed for the old neoliberal globalist order do nothing to inform us about what Trump is doing and why. And if we had to condense his cliques’ motivation to one word it would be: China.
Understanding the deeper causes of this realignment, and studying how it has manifested in the past, are crucial because they manifest also within our own movements. There is a long history of labor imperialism – the participation of the unions in helping to back and run the imperialist project – and certainly this did not evaporate under neoliberal globalism. But the return to domestic production and nationalism gives a far greater material basis for Trump and his cohort to pass handouts to native-born industrial workers and their union-bureaucrat representatives, in terms of tariffs, industrial policy, and investment, as well as reducing wage competition for native-born workers through mass deportations. This is the ‘imperialist dividend’ which buys their support, and anyone who has been following the labor movement closely in the last few years has seen this process already underway.
At the same time, we have already seen that not only imperialism, but anti-imperialism too has a revitalized role in labor and in wider political life. The Palestinian solidarity movement has served as a key catalyst for organizing and wedge issues in so many fields of struggle, from unions, to the student movement, to elections, and more. And while the genocide in Gaza (which has not truly ended, nor has justice or peace been secured) continues to simmer and spark, we can expect also that the inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China will continue to grow. And if countering the US military build up towards China does not now stand large as a movement within labor and the progressive left, we should not count on it to stay that way. Rather, it is likely that any preparations made by the left now will pay dividends in the not-so-distant future in this respect.
More immediately, Trump’s provocations in Latin America cannot help but to spark tremendous resistance on the ground in the region, by workers, indigenous people, and all those who oppose imperialist meddling and war. Already, powerful resistance has formed to counter US meddling in the region, with Bolivian workers facing down their right wing, Trump-backed government earlier this month, and inspiring US activists to escalate their resistance in turn.
The foreign affairs of US imperialism will not remain foreign to the US people. Already, we see the tying together of resistance to ICE terror and to the illegal intervention in Venezuela. And not only can we in the imperial core be inspired by the resistance of our southern siblings, but so too can our resistance fuel fightback throughout the Western Hemisphere and the world. And when Rome burns, the fire will spread throughout the empire.
Featured image: Uyuni Salt Flat, Bolivia by Dan Lundberg Licence: cc-by-sa-2.0.
- “Navarro’s Ties to Nucor Highlight Trump Advisers’ Steel-Industry Connections,” The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2018. https://archive.is/8SxPr
↩︎ - https://archive.is/20250310121120/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-10/supply-chain-latest-trump-steel-and-aluminum-tariffs
↩︎ - https://archive.is/20250426140810/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/26/peter-navarro-tariffs-trump-china/
↩︎ - https://thediplomat.com/2025/12/chinas-military-is-planning-for-combat-in-latin-america/ ↩︎
- https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20260122-venezuela-interim-president-to-visit-usa ↩︎
- https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-military-once-had-much-bigger-presence-greenland-ps-011726
↩︎
Henry De Groot
Henry De Groot, he/him, is involved with the Boston DSA Labor Working Group, an editor of Working Mass, and author of the book Student Radicals and the Rise of Russian Marxism.
