Trump’s new imperial disorder

We live in dangerous, disorientating times.1 The world was already a terrifying enough place before Donald Trump returned to the White House in early 2025: with Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a human meat grinder in Ukraine and sabre rattling between the United States and China in East Asia. However, now Trump is tearing up the US foreign policy playbook, replacing it with what appear as a series of unpredictable, irrational twists and turns. 

In the opening months of his presidency, Trump started “peace negotiations” with Russia, declaring the US would no longer guarantee the security of European states, and bludgeoned Ukraine into handing over some of its mineral resources. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, once deified as a Nelson Mandela-like figure in the West, suffered a public dressing down at an infamous press conference in the Oval Office. Afterwards, the US briefly stopped military aid and intelligence-sharing to force Zelensky to sign his minerals deal. By summer 2025, less than half a year later, Trump’s bravado that he could end the war within 24 hours was gone. He now said he was “not done but still disappointed” with Russian president Vladimir Putin.2 Trump increased military aid to Zelensky in July, as the US and Russia battled on in their proxy war.

The week before Trump’s volte face over Ukraine, he unveiled a plan for the US-sponsored ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It would have seen the US seize control of the territory and the “resettlement” of Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan. This provoked a backlash from Arab regimes that are part of the US imperial infrastructure in the Middle East, fearful that their complicity in open ethnic cleansing would stoke a revolt against their own rule. Only a few months later, Trump was touring the region, looking to make deals with Gulf states and the new Syrian regime. He notably snubbed Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, later getting into a shouting match with Netanyahu when the latter denied images of starving children in Gaza were real.

When Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, the White House initially offered a lukewarm response, saying it had known about the strikes but had not taken part. Less than a week later, the US’s B-2 strategic bombers had dropped powerful “bunker buster” bombs on the site in a theatrical display of imperial might. In response, the Iranian regime launched missile strikes on a US base in Qatar, but no US forces were harmed in this retaliatory attack: Trump thanked the regime for informing the US ahead of the attacks. He then moved to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. When it seemed that this would not hold, with Netanyahu ordering more air strikes on Iran, a visibly exasperated Trump exclaimed: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”. His public admonishment of Israel and Iran put a swift end to what he had dubbed the “12 Day War”.3

It is tempting to attribute these chaotic shifts solely to Trump, the vulgar and narcissistic businessman, with a transactional approach to politics. However, such approaches downplay Trump’s role as a morbid symptom of a deep political crisis, one intertwined with the decline of US hegemony. Indeed, Trump’s more transactional approach is partly symptomatic of the crisis of a US-led “rules-based international order” built around multilateral agreements. Trump’s use of spectacle and a political strategy of “flooding the zone” with announcements to disorientate opponents shapes his foreign policy. However, Trump’s actions flow from something deeper than short-term political calculation. To make sense of the new imperial disorder, we require a Marxist understanding of imperialism, and we need to grasp the three interlinked shifts taking place. The first shift is the return of “great-power competition”, reflecting in particular the long-term decline of the US and the rise of China. The second is the breakdown of the liberal world order under Trump. The third is the rise of regional imperialist powers, or “sub-imperialisms”, outside the historic core of capitalism.

What is imperialism?

Understandably, a dominant view of imperialism sees it as stronger nation-states dominating weaker ones, for example, the US and Britain invading Iraq or Russia invading Ukraine. This is an important feature of modern imperialism but invasions of weaker states by stronger states or the creation of empires were also features of many societies in earlier historical periods. However, there is something unique about modern, capitalist imperialism. The political tradition associated with International Socialism has built on the classical Marxist theory of imperialism developed by Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin, along with many other revolutionary socialists in the run-up to the First World War.

Imperialism is a global system of competing capitalist states that was born out of the development of capitalism in the 19th century. At a certain stage of development in the latter part of the century, the geopolitical rivalry of states and capitalist economic competition began to fuse in a novel way.4

The British liberal economist John Atkinson Hobson’s influential 1902 book Imperialism: A Study described a “cut throat struggle of competing empires. He argued that the “leading characteristic of modern imperialism” was the “competition of rival empires”, and that the very “notion of a number of competing empires is essentially modern”.5 This provided the context for the Marxists who sought to develop a theory to understand what was driving this competition. As capitalism developed in the late 19th century, it was also marked by the acceleration of a process that Karl Marx called the “concentration” and “centralisation” of capital.6 When firms compete with one another to grab a larger share of profits, the more successful ones can not only grow rapidly through the accumulation of capital (concentration) but also swallow up or merge with rivals (centralisation). This leads to a situation where, instead of hundreds of small firms, a handful of vast corporations come to dominate key sectors.

Lenin and Bukharin saw that these changes to capitalism brought together two key developments: first, a growing internationalisation of production, circulation and exchange of capital; second, an increasing interdependence between the state and capital. Although corporations operate internationally, they depend on their own nation-states to further their interests, for example, through the projection of military power and the securing of markets. Yet, states depend on capitalist firms to develop a military and industrial base that is required to wage modern warfare.7

Some specific empirical claims in Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism or Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy were flawed, over-generalised or no longer hold. However, the core of the classical Marxist theory of imperialism stands the test of time and remains indispensable to understanding the threat of war today.8

One popular argument challenged by Lenin was the claim that the growth of free trade and free markets makes war less likely. Yet, capitalism is not a system of even and linear development. Instead, it sees states constantly trying to get to the top of the global pecking order. This involves cutthroat competition that can see today’s capitalist hegemon challenged or overtaken by states that lagged far behind only a few decades earlier—as we see with the rise of China. This takes place despite the integration of national economies. For example, the US and China are economically interdependent but compete for dominance with one another. The constant shifts in the relative power of the different nation-states within the global imperialist system drives a logic of imperialist competition that can build towards war. Imperialist competition can also increase unevenness, most dramatically with instances such as the widespread destruction of much of Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of imperialism in the early 2000s, and this can intensify the pressure on states to develop rapidly.

One of the great strengths of Lenin’s work on imperialism is that it grasped the importance of what he called uneven development:

The only conceivable basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, interests, colonies and so on is a calculation of the strength of those participating, their general economic, financial, military strength and so forth. The strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, because the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry and countries is impossible under capitalism.9

This insight is vital to understanding what is driving the increasing imperialist competition in the world today.

The US world order and its discontents

The strategy of US imperialism differed from the old European empires that had dominated the world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The US had experimented with colonies—notably Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. However, once it had established itself as the leading capitalist state by the end of the Second World War, it sought to build a liberal capitalist world order based on free trade and free markets, which its mass production industries and corporations could dominate. During the Cold War, which took shape in this period, the world was divided into spheres of influence led by the US and Soviet Union, leading to inter-imperialist conflict centred on a clash between a US-led capitalist bloc and a Soviet-led “bureaucratic state-capitalist” bloc.10

The US built a liberal capitalist world order, uniting the other Western capitalist countries under its leadership. There was always a military dimension to this hegemony. US capitalism’s dominance was backed by military might, through NATO and hundreds of military bases across the world. The US-based sociologist David Vine gives a sense of the reach of the US’s military reach. In 2015, he noted: “Despite closing hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad—from giant ‘Little Americas’ to small radar facilities. Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have about 30 foreign bases combined”.11 The US retains a presence in Germany and Italy, where force numbers have remained relatively stable despite the end of the Cold War, Japan, Honduras, Thailand and the Philippines.

Washington could also use the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and dominance of the dollar to project its power abroad. This “Bretton Woods system” saw states peg their currency to the dollar, with the dollar pegged to the price of gold (set at $35 an ounce by Congress). By doing so, the US was able to fix the supply of dollars, make sure its corporations had favourable terms of trade and prevent a return to the era of competitive devaluations of the 1930s.12 Although this system fractured during the crisis of the 1970s, the US could still rely on the IMF, the World Bank and dollar dominance to force neoliberal policies onto states, even in a world of free-floating exchange rates.

One important impact of the Cold War was, as Alex Callinicos argues, the “partial dissociation of economical and geopolitical competition”:

In other words, as a result of the integration of advanced capitalism into a single “Western” geopolitical and ideological bloc, economic rivalries among capitals did not have the same potential to become military confrontations as they had had in the earlier era of classical imperialism, when Germany emerged as both an industrial and naval challenger to British hegemony.13

Today, we are seeing the violent re-articulation of economic and geopolitical competition, fuelling the return of “great power rivalries”. In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, the US was the only world superpower left standing, but it was clear even in this moment of triumph for Washington that trouble was brewing. The old war criminal and foreign policy advisor Henry Kissinger warned that the US would face intense economic competition, particularly from China. In the 1990s, he argued that the US was still in “no better position to dictate the global agenda unilaterally than it was at the beginning of the Cold War”:

The United States will face economic competition of a kind it never experienced during the Cold War…domination of a single power of either Europe or Asia…remains a good definition of strategic danger to America… Such a grouping would have the capacity to outstrip America economically. China is on the road to superpower status… China’s Gross National Product will approach that of the United States by the end of the second decade of the 21st century.14

Sections of the US ruling class sought to overcome the threat of relative economic decline through a brute assertion of military might. This included expanding the NATO alliance in Eastern Europe, breaking a promise to the last leader of the Soviet Union and fuelling imperialist competition that would lead to the devastation of Ukraine. However, dominating the Middle East and its vast oil reserves was key for the US. The US did not need to grab the oil for itself but wanted control over this key resource for global capitalism, using it to send a signal to potential rivals. The grouping known as the Project for a New American Century gained influence when the Republican George W Bush became president in 2001. The Bush administration was obsessed with invading Iraq, using the 9/11 terrorist attacks to launch invasions first of Afghanistan and then, in 2003, Iraq. However, Iraq and Afghanistan proved major geopolitical defeats for the US, signalling to its rivals that it was possible to assert their own interests more. One consequence of its defeat in the “war on terror” was, contrary to its aims, a strengthening of Iranian influence. When facing the threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) overrunning the Iraqi government in 2014, the US was forced to work with Iran, which it had branded as part of the “axis of evil” only a few years before, to stem the advance.

Defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan were intertwined with the failures of neoliberal globalisation. The capitalist system had entered a crisis of profitability in the 1970s, suffering two oil shocks and both a rise in inflation and slowdown in growth. The response of the US ruling class was to push neoliberal policies, including advocating free markets and free trade policies. This saw some production shift out of the US and into less developed economies in the Global South, opening up the possibility of some states emerging as competitors. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced reforms in 1978 to liberalise its state-capitalist economy. Although the Chinese economy remained state-directed, it was opened up to foreign investment, with private capital now accounting for 60 percent of China’s gross domestic product (GDP).

The rise of China as a manufacturing powerhouse has reshaped much of the global economy and imperialist competition beyond Asia. As Anne Alexander notes: “One of the effects of [China’s rise] is a reorientation of the Middle East’s fossil fuel production and export infrastructure towards Asia”.15 This allows China greater influence in the region. For example, in 2023, it brokered the normalisation of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia without the US, a manoeuvre that would have been unthinkable in earlier periods. Rapid growth allowed Chinese imperialism to flex its muscles more generally. Its plans to upgrade its industry technologically threaten big tech—US-based firms such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft and Tesla. This competition forms part of the background to Trump launching a trade war aimed primarily at China—and his plans for “re-shoring” manufacturing to the US.16

In South East Asia and the Pacific, competition between the US and China is intensifying. Alongside Trump’s trade war, the threat of real war looms. The largest joint military exercises in Australia’s history took place in June 2025, involving 35,000 troops from 19 states, led by the US. When asked why, US commanders had a simple answer: China. The year had already seen a series of the largest military drills held in the Pacific since the end of the Second World War. Chinese president Xi Jinping has told the armed forces to be prepared for an invasion of Taiwan by 2027.

The return of “great power” competition

In recent years, and especially since 2018, the US has seen “great power competition” rather than the “war on terror” as its main challenge. The Russian invasion of Ukraine christened this new reality. As I wrote on the one-year anniversary in this journal:

Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the US has waged a series of wars against weaker states in order to maintain its hegemony. Largely, though not exclusively, these have been in the Global South. They include, for example, its wars in Somalia and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s. Today, however, we face a world of competing great powers, in which the most powerful states are moving into more direct confrontation with one another. This process is not just being played out between the US and Russia but also between the US and China. Indeed, the competition between the US and China is the main rivalry in the global system.17

NATO, in a 2022 document, makes this explicit:

The growing power and assertiveness of China is the other major geopolitical development that is changing the strategic calculus of NATO. China poses a very different kind of challenge to NATO than Russia; unlike the latter it is not, at present, a direct military threat to the Euro-Atlantic area. Nevertheless, China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft. It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbours, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy, well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G, and protect sensitive sectors of the economy, including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.18

However, imperialist competition is intensifying at all levels of the system, not just among major powers such as the US and China. The decline of US hegemony has opened up a space for the rise of regional imperialist powers in the Middle East, and competition is increasing among them. The major regional players include Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).19 A regional imperialism is a power that emerges outside the historical centre of the capitalist system and strives to become a centre of capital accumulation. It seeks to use its power in the same way the big imperialists states do, but on a regional basis and often in relation to a big power or powers, for example, the US and Israel, or Iran’s ties with China and Russia.20

In other words, imperialism is a global system of capitalist states marked by competition at all levels.21 In this hierarchy of capitalist states, there is a pressure on all states to jockey for position and aspire to gain more influence and go up the pecking order. However, this does not mean that every state that seeks to influence its neighbours is a regional imperialist power. The key question is: what states, based on their economic, military and political resources, can credibly enter the contest for hegemony on a regional basis? A state’s role or capacities cannot be mechanically read off from the size of its military or economy. These factors do matter, but it has to be judged in relation to other states and imperialism more broadly.

The rise of regional imperialist powers is linked to a relatively more advanced level of capitalist development attained by a large number of states. Israel has long been the watchdog of US imperialism in the region, and it relies on the west to arm and fund its genocide. However, it is now far from dependent on Western economic aid, having become by many metrics an advanced industrial state. Israel’s tech sector, where its semiconductor chip designers play a major role for Western firms, is one example. Similarly, Saudi Arabia is no longer a giant petrol pump for US corporations. Indeed, the non-oil sector accounted for more than 50 percent of GDP for the first time since in 2023. Even Iran, isolated by the US sanctions regime, has been forced to develop its domestic manufacturing industry. A more advanced level of capitalist development allows the state to project its power, militarily and economically. For example, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and the UAE all intervened in Syria to shape the outcome in their interests. As a state gains more leverage within the global economy, it is able to go against or at least challenge what the major imperialist powers want.

Egypt stands in sharp contrast to Israel. Egypt is part of the US imperialist infrastructure in the Middle East, maintains a vast military and presents itself as a regional player. Yet, its role in the region is not comparable to Israel, Saudi Arabia or Iran. It is nowhere near becoming a centre of capital accumulation; it is subordinated to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. As Anne Alexander writes:

The political and military neutralisation of Egypt was bound up with the earlier phase of Israel’s rise. Egypt’s defeat in 1967 was followed first by its acceptance of Washington’s neoliberal economic agenda and shortly afterwards by a peace treaty with Israel signed at Camp David in 1978. The Egyptian ruling class repeatedly missed opportunities to move to a more advanced phase of industrial development, and the vast flows of military aid were designed to guarantee the Egyptian Army’s role as internal gendarme rather than regional hegemon. By contrast, Israel has been propelled into the ranks of “developed” countries, underpinning a mutually beneficial economic and military partnership between the Israeli and US ruling classes.22

Socialists should not remain equivocal in a war between a major imperialist power and a regional imperialist one. For example, a war between the US, Israel and Iran demands socialists stand for the defeat of Israel and its ally. Such a defeat would weaken imperialism and expand the space for movements of resistance, such as the one for Palestinian liberation. However, that does not imply having illusions about the states of the region, such as the Iran, as principled “anti-imperialist” forces. Instead, the political tradition associated with this journal supported the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. Hope lies with deepening revolts and infusing them with the unique power of the working class. The rise of more advanced capitalist states ultimately helps create and imbue with power a larger working class able to challenge its own rulers and the imperialist order across the region.

China, China, China: Trump’s strategy

There is a degree of continuity between the foreign policies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump: defending US hegemony against its main challengers. Trump is not the first US president to be obsessed with the rise of China. The administrations of Democrats Barack Obama and Biden were equally worried that China would emerge as a “peer competitor” to the US.

Obama began what was dubbed the “pivot to Asia”, focusing the bulk of US naval strength in the Pacific. His administration tried to minimise China’s role in the supply chain for high tech electronics. As part of this process, the Obama administration pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade deal that involved 12 Asian states—but not China. Trump’s first presidency withdrew the US from TPP, in favour of a more protectionist trade policy, but the overall process of economic competition with China, and trying to minimise its influence in tech, continued. Trump, for example, waged a campaign against the Chinese telecoms company Huawei. Biden would build on this, through the Chips Act that boosted the domestic manufacture of semiconductors. This was part of a broader strategy, often dubbed “Bidenomics”, that tried to leverage the power of the state to make US capitalism more competitive. It aimed to rebuild domestic manufacturing through industrial policy, which included a mixture of subsidies and tariffs. The aim was to bolster the weight of US capitalism and to enable a vast rearmament programme. Biden was forced to water down such plans due to the sluggish state of the US economy, but the administration did borrow and spend vast sums of money as it tried to rebuild domestic manufacturing. These policies accompanied the Biden administration’s attempts to rally other states against US rivals, notably by using the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia and send a signal to China. It also included the Aukus nuclear submarine deal with Australia and Britain.

Biden’s version of “liberal” imperialism has been replaced by Trump, who prefers a more unilateral approach: seeing US allies as draining US resources, insisting instead that they pay their own way, for instance by funding Ukrainian security guarantees in the event of a ceasefire deal with Russia. This is part of a broader shift taking place in US foreign policy. Marco Rubio recently described how the Trump administration wanted to deal with a world of many “great powers”. He explained how the US wanted to maintain dominance in the world, but not through the institutions of the liberal capitalist order. Instead of “multilateral agreements” between the US and many allies, it would focus on bilateral ones:

The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China. The Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. Where our interests align, that’s where you have partnerships and alliances. Where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests.23

According to him, “that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world”:

And so, we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power—that was an anomaly and a product of the end of the Cold War. But eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.24

Trump’s tariff wars are part of a renewed effort to pull in other states behind the US in its competition with China. The European Union’s (EU) agreement with the US, for example, should be seen as a surrender in this context. However, there are limits to the shifts that Rubio described. For example, the Trump administration’s moves in the Middle East and Ukraine intensify the crisis faced by US imperialism. The US has relied heavily on the alliances to maintain dominance for decades; they are far too useful for US imperialism to abandon completely. In the Middle East, too, Trump was pushing alliances with Egypt and Jordan to breaking point over his Gaza ethnic cleansing plan. However, it is not in the interest of the US to see those Arab states ally with China. 

After Trump’s initial shift over Ukraine, Europe’s leaders and NATO members were caught between pleading with Trump and pretending they could act independently of him. British prime minister Keir Starmer was quick to say Britain would be “willing and ready” to put “boots on the ground”, as part of a “peace keeping operation” after a deal was struck. He added that Britain would act as “a bridge between the US and Europe”.25 However, the EU is far too disunited and dysfunctional to become a world power. Capitalist competition among its member states was always baked into European integration. That was highlighted by the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. It showed the limits—or lack—of EU military power and how divisions among member states hampered a united response. Furthermore, today, France and Germany—the most important states in the EU—are mired by political and economic crises.26

Another example is how NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte ingratiated himself with Trump in the Oval Office in July. He stressed: “This is, again, Europeans stepping up. So, I’ve been in contact with many countries. I can tell you that at this moment, Germany massively, but also Finland and Denmark and Sweden and Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada: They all want to be part of this”.27 In practice, what has been the response in NATO? A new arms race with Britain, Germany and France and others all pledging to increase “defence” spending as a percentage of GDP.

What is the deal with Iran?

The US bombing of Iran highlighted the tensions in the relationship between the US and Israel. Israel has been a settler-colony dependent on imperialism from its birth. Israel’s genocide in Palestine would not be possible without the US’s arms supplies of historic funding. Emboldened by its attack on Gaza, its ambitions now reach far beyond Palestine. In February 2025, Netanyahu said: “The decisions we made in the war have already changed the face of the Middle East. Our decisions and the courage of our soldiers have redrawn the map. But I believe that working closely with president Trump, we can redraw it even further”.28 However, Israel’s growth as a regional imperialist power and the difficult situation in which US imperialism finds itself means it is able to strain at the leash more, even beginning to clash with US wishes. The scale of the genocide has caused tensions between the US and Israel. Sections of the ruling class in the US fear that the scale of its assaults could spur resistance against Arab regimes in the region. However, Netanyahu has been able to play the US whenever faced with the mildest criticism or calls for “restraint”. He knows, when push comes to shove, the US will back its watchdog state in the region. As a result, Netanyahu has invaded Lebanon, grabbed more land in Syria and launched attacks on Iran, seeking to use each new escalation to lock in Western support. 

Netanyahu greeted Trump’s re-election as president in 2024 by sacking a supposedly more “liberal” defence minister and ramping up his genocidal attacks. Yet, Trump is dealing with a deeper crisis of US hegemony and imperial overstretch. He has sought to build stronger links with Gulf States and the new regime in Syria, giving the impression that he attaches less weight to Israel than the previous Biden administration. This included Trump’s initial attempt to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran, partly due to broader imperialist rivalries with China, which buys 90 percent of Iran’s oil and is seeking to use this relationship to built its own influence in the Middle East. Netanyahu was aghast at the thought of a US-Iran deal, launching the series of air strikes that ultimately pushed the US into its bombing of Iran. However, we can also see why, in this context, Trump then drew back so quickly. Trump still believes he needs Israel to secure US interests, but he does not see the US benefiting from provoking a full-scale war with Iran. Iran, for its part, needed to retaliate, but it also wanted to avoid a wider confrontation, not least because its regional allies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been weakened under Israeli assaults, and also because it faces resistance at home.

However, this episode highlighted another important feature of the US-Israeli relationship. When Trump put his foot down, Israel held to the ceasefire and stopped new attacks. The decline of US hegemony gives regional imperialist powers more room for manoeuvre, but this is not without limits. Moreover, it is competition between the big powers that still shapes the dynamics of imperialism on a global scale, and regional imperialisms more generally have to operate within this wider context.

Trump and Russia

The mainstream media branded Trump as “pro-Russian” after his policy shift over Ukraine. This is false for two reasons. First, it is vital to understand that Ukraine has never been a war for freedom and self-determination, nor did it begin with Russia’s brutal invasion in February 2022. Instead, there has been a proxy war between US and Russian imperialism developing since the 1990s. Biden saw Ukraine as an opportunity to overcome US imperialism’s defeats in the Middle East. He wanted to weaken Russia, which he saw as one of China’s key allies. Biden described Ukraine as an “inflection point in the world” to a group of business leaders at the White House shortly after the Russian invasion. “There’s going to be a new world order out there and we’ve got to lead it,” he added.29 This fitted with a longer-term ambition in US foreign policy circles. For example, colonel Alexander Vindman was a leading official in the US National Security Council during Trump’s first presidency between 2018 and 2020. After leaving, he spent his time drumming up support for US and NATO involvement in Ukraine. In November 2021, Vindman argued that “Ukraine’s strategic value to NATO” could “enable US and Euro-Atlantic aspirations for competition with Russia and with China”.30 

In other words, the US strategy in Ukraine was to “bleed Russia dry” through a process of “managed escalation”.31 In practice, this meant giving Ukraine enough arms to tie down Russia forces without risking a wider conflict. However, despite over £100 billion in US aid, Ukraine is an abattoir of imperial ambition with no victory in sight. Russia has, so far, managed to insulate its economy from Western sanctions by reorienting its oil and gas exports eastwards and through military Keynesianism. One impact is that it has drawn Russia and China closer together and this is something that the Trump Whitehouse wants to prevent. So, once again, the shift is policy is rooted in wider US concerns related to China.

A crisis of legitimacy

Although Trump has charted a new strategy relative to that of his predecessors, he, too, is running up against the limits of US power. For over 30 years, US imperialism has destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other countries under the guise of “humanitarian intervention”. At the same time, it holds up Israel as a “civilised society” and the “one democracy” in the region. Many people always rejected Western talk of “humanitarian intervention”, but some did accept it, at least in some instances. For many of them, Israel’s daily toll of war crimes has come as a shock. Seeing the West's premier Middle Eastern ally in the dock for war crimes has helped shatter an entire worldview.

Since October 2023, the horrifying scenes of Israel’s genocide in Gaza have flashed on our phone screens every day. Israel has spread death and destruction across the Middle East: invading Lebanon, occupying more territory in Syria and threatening a terrifying regional war with its attacks on Iran. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is usually an echo-chamber for Western interests. When the South African government brought a case of genocide against Israel, many on the left were not expecting much from the judges. Yet, because of the clear genocidal nature of Israel’s attacks, and the international movement of solidarity against them, the ICJ did decide that there was a case to answer. Even Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron, hardly friends of the Palestinians, have suggested they will recognise a Palestinian state at some point in the future, such is the outrage directed at them by millions, including among their own electorates. This opens up the possibility of a wider layer of people generalising, and developing a n understanding of imperialism. This can cut through the hypocrisy in which Russia bombing a Ukrainian hospital is depicted as a war crime but Israel is allowed to describe bombing a Palestinian hospital as self-defence. The task remains building a powerful movement of solidarity with Palestine, but also a broader anti-war movement that can exploit the growing divisions among the global ruling class, as well as linking opposition to war to Starmer’s diversion of welfare expenditure into a new arms race.

Tomáš Tengely-Evans is the editor of Socialist Worker.

Notes