Imperialism in the 21st century – the end of US dominance?

The election of Donald Trump has thrown into flux the certainties of a global order established after World War Two. Fraser Amos considers the changing shape of imperialism in the 21st century, and how socialists should respond.

Palestine and normalisation

Before his inauguration, Trump dispatched his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to read Netanyahu the riot act and force Israel to accept a ceasefire in Gaza. Since then, Trump has sanctioned a renewed assault on Gaza, settler violence in the West Bank and embraced the genocidal demands and rhetoric of the Israeli far-right for the ‘reno-viction’ of Gaza. Neighbouring states have come under renewed US pressure to accept displaced Gazans and naturalise Palestinian refugees, combining with the defunding of UNRWA to undermine the right of return and the viability of Palestinian national self-determination. All pretence of respect for the Oslo Accords and the human rights of Palestinians has been dropped.

Whilst some chalk such inchoate moves up to Trump’s erratic political style, by stopping here we risk missing the internal logic and significance of his foreign policy. Trump’s desire to tick off campaign promises of peace and to pose as a peacemaker is no doubt significant in explaining his initial enforcement of a ceasefire. But it also represents a shift in US imperial strategy away from Biden’s collaboration with allies to defeat threats to its hegemony from Palestine, Russia and China. On each front, Trump however has shifted towards a strategy of unilateral pursuit of dominance centred on the American hemisphere. 

The change in US administration has not altered the fundamental importance of Israel in securing the projection of US military power eastwards and the flow of the labour and resources westwards. The US is concerned that its relative economic weight in the region is slipping. China is now the largest importer of Saudi oil, and has mediated a normalisation of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other regional states are pursuing an increasingly independent geopolitical strategy, as seen in the Arab counterproposal for Gaza’s reconstruction. The US has been desperate to firm up its position by strengthening relations between its allies in the region and normalise their relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords.

The normalisation of Israel’s settler colonial war on the Palestinian people however faces widespread popular opposition across the Middle East. 7 October and Israel’s retaliatory genocide has succeeded in derailing normalisation at least for now. Over the last two years the US has demonstrated a clear interest in inflicting devastating colonial punishment for this and the breach of the apartheid wall of ‘western civilisation’ it represented.

Yet the US has also had an interest in preventing popular solidarity with Palestine in the region reaching a pitch that would kill normalisation altogether and threaten friendly and quiescent governments. Such governments maintain a Janus-face of formal solidarity with Palestine and support for a two-state solution on the one hand, and growing trade and diplomatic links with Israel and collaboration with the US on the other. The fates of popular struggles across the region and the Palestinian liberation struggle are inextricably linked.

The victories of counterrevolution in the wake of the Arab Spring have strengthened the hand of Zionism. In Cairo, the ruling Egyptian military is sustained by generous funding and supplies from the United States following the Camp David Accords. While the majority of US Aid given to Jordan has been cut, military aid has not. Turkey, a NATO member state, has helped Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham into power in Syria, as Israel has destroyed Syria’s military capabilities and extended its occupation of the south of the country. The post-revolutionary settlement in Syria appears substantially caught between these two powers.

Energy Embargo for Palestine gives one example of how to press at these contradictions from without. Through the Stop Fuelling Genocide campaign they are targeting the BTC pipeline, which supplies 30 per cent of Israel’s oil from Caspian Sea reserves through Azerbaijan and Turkey. Working with Turkish Filistin İçin 1000 Genç, Progressive International and Turkish parliamentarians, they were able to compile, publish and present in the Turkish Parliament evidence of Turkey’s supply of this oil to Israel despite Erdogan’s claim to have placed a trade embargo on the state.

The success of the Yemeni people in their militant support for the Palestinian struggle further highlights the military limits of US hegemony. In the Red Sea Ansar Allah (usually referred to in the British media as ‘the Houthis’) has been able to substantially disrupt Israeli and global shipping through relatively cheap and accessible weaponry with US and western responses having been unable to quell this disruption. From the Red Sea to 7 October, to Iraq and Afghanistan, the advantages of asymmetric military warfare and military-technological superiority in the face of insurgent resistance have eroded.

Dominance without hegemony

In a context of increasing intra-regional competition, Trump has forced Israel into line with US foreign policy imperatives whilst abandoning any pretence of respect for the United Nations, international law or humanitarianism. These are more than just empty hypocrisies. They constitute in turn the political, juridical and ideological hegemonic infrastructure of the world order established in the aftermath of the Second World War. They underpin the formal appearance of equality between nations, the rule of law above them and political norms independent of them – obfuscating the leading position of of the United States in its institutional architecture and its unrivalled dominance over global trade, finance and ownership, embodied in the World Bank, World Trade Organisation and International Monetary Fund. This hegemonic infrastructure both reflects real victories of 20th century anti-colonial revolution as well as the containment of their revolutionary potential.

To Biden and the Democrats the role of the US in establishing this order is proof that it is the ‘essential nation’, whose ‘leadership is what holds the world together’. The United States steps outside its bounds only exceptionally to preserve their conditions of possibility. Cracking under the pressure of the genocide in Gaza, the Biden administration was engaged in a rear-guard action to hold together US global hegemony – keen to cooperate with imperial allies and bolster the credibility of NATO. While liberal denial brands Trump’s foreign policy as exceptionally reckless, Biden brought this alliance to the brink of nuclear armed conflict with Russia to do so.

Trump has abandoned what he sees as the losing game of hegemony, making a bid to impose US imperial interests outright through brute economic and geopolitical force. To their shock, the governing elites of the US’ imperial allies find themselves ordered into line in a manner ordinarily reserved for those of the global south.

Provincialising Europe

Valentines Day left European ruling elites reeling from a scolding by JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference. The Vice President admonished them to return to shared traditional values, make peace with the rise of the far-right and embrace rearmament to match the US’s 3.4 per cent of GDP rate of military expenditure. In the weeks that followed, European elites have been swept up in panicked anxiety in response to the US’s volte-face on the war in Ukraine, Europe’s and Ukraine’s exclusion from peace talks with Russia, and US equivocation on NATO commitments.

In the view of the Trump administration European nations have become dependent on the US to fight a war with Russia which is a distraction from the challenge posed by China. Military freeloading and a substantial trade surplus enables Europeans to maintain a profligate social settlement on the teat of American largesse. Governing elites in hoc to woke bureaucracy sprawling out from Brussels are subverting the popular rise of the far-right at every turn.

The administration hopes to strengthen the hand of far-right allies across the continent, aiding them into power over rearmed states. Europeanist governments have responded to US abandonment by obliging. From Merz in Germany to Starmer in Britain they are embarking on an unprecedented programme of rearmament whilst accommodating nativist politics and dismantling the social state. They seek to portray themselves as the only alternative to fascism, even as they are active participants in the fascisation of European politics and guilty parties to the genocide in Gaza. 

We cannot miss the opportunities offered by a new era of Great Power competition to expose and build popular opposition to imperialism. The overriding unity of US foreign policy with the interests of US capital could hardly be more immediate or naked. The peace and prosperity promised by NATO membership is being revealed as the chimera that it has always been for the working-class the world over. Remilitarisation threatens to further accelerate social and ecological breakdown, posing imperialism as an increasingly existential political question for environmental, social and labour movements across the global north. Socialists must take every opportunity to answer with a class politics opposed to militarisation, alignment with NATO and collaboration with the extreme centre.

In Ukraine rock-solid US military support has become leverage for the extortion of £500 billion in mineral reserves to complement renewed access to Russian hydrocarbons and export markets. The US has turned from hypocritical condemnation of Russia’s crime of aggression to the dismissal of Ukrainian national sovereignty as sentimental naivete. The hope of NATO membership for Ukraine, over which the war has been fought, is dead, replaced by an offer of neocolonial domination by the United States. The working-class in Ukraine and Russia has been compelled to pay for this prize with hundreds of thousands of lives.

The national and imperial

The end of US hegemony poses the renewed challenge of delivering solidarity in the face of expanding powers such as Russia in a way which cannot simply be leveraged to strengthen British and US imperialism. Solidarity with the people of Ukraine has become synonymous with the state’s supply of military aid, escalating the war and deepening its proxy character. Many of the interventions made in the name of left solidarity with Ukraine since 2022 have prepared the ground for the renewal of British militarism we now confront. This experience should leave us wary of a politics of international solidarity abstracted from our concrete position within and in relation to our state’s imperial class character.

Rights to self-determination, self-defence and sovereignty, wielded without a concrete class analysis, have legitimated militarism. The question is always however ‘self’ determination for who? For those working-class Ukrainians deserting the front who refuse to line up behind its ruling class? What is the ‘self’ in self-defence when a war effort hinges on US and European weapons, advisors, intelligence, strategy, in service of ulterior imperial interests? What form of sovereignty has as its condition the right to join a military alliance for the domination of the international working class?

Solidarity with those oppressed on the basis of nationality must understand nationality itself as a creature of the uneven relations between and across capitalist states. First and foremost, imperialism is not a characteristic of any particular state, the export of capital from industrialised nations, or a political reflex of this process. Imperialism is the form of inter/intra state relations taken by the colonially uneven and geographically segmented exploitation and extraction of labour and nature which has constituted the expanded reproduction of capital from its emergence. It is a historically specific ordering of these relations, a form of world order, in the conjunctures of which every national question must be concretely analysed.

From Washington to Moscow

Liberal opinion in the West balks at Trump’s rapprochement with Russia and political affinities with Putin as an obscene departure from normalcy. Yet this obscures the intimate imperial entanglements of the United States and the Russian Federation since its emergence from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Great Russian chauvinism and militarism must be understood in terms of these concrete historical conditions of emergence. The invasion of Ukraine cannot be characterised as of a kind with the relationship between the two nations within the Soviet Union, nor as a recommencement of pre-Soviet Russian imperialism. Russia’s relative strength and relation to global political economy are radically different. The oligarchic predation of the Soviet social state, tutored by the United States, IMF and World Bank, hollowed out Russia’s economy, reducing Russian political economy to that of arms dealer, oil baron and mercenary to the world. The end of geopolitical and military union at the direction of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s initiated processes of exclusionary nation-state formation which have gripped the post-Soviet space. This dissolution was based on commitments from the US not to expand NATO eastwards, the violation of which has breathed new life into the imperial impulses of Russian capitalism.

The period since the end of the Cold War in 1991 has seen the United States launch several invasions and military operations in contravention of the normal principles of international law and in excess of United Nations mandates. Russia closely collaborated in the invasion of Afghanistan and the launch of the War on Terror, receiving strong support from Blair’s government for its brutal ‘anti-terror operation’ in Chechnya. Notably, Russia used the precedent of western recognition of Kosovan independence in recognising the independence of Crimea in 2014.

Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has been formally in keeping with the example established by the United States in its period of unipolar dominance. Ukraine’s distinction is to have been a European nation moving closer to the western alliance, its population understood as, for these purposes at least, white. This is reflected in the state-led hegemonic character of the Ukraine solidarity movement in Britain – one which has proved remarkably bellicose and comfortable with the repression of worker organising and integration of fascist paramilitary organisations within the Ukrainian military.  

That this was predicted by leading US foreign policy strategists gave America no pause for thought in the ceaseless pursuit of geopolitical dominance and force-projection in eastern Europe. The Ukrainian working class has been collateral damage in its clash with the reactionary nationalism in Russia it has worked to foster. 

There are few forms of reaction in the world to which the United States has not either provided direct aid, or weakened progressive and revolutionary alternatives. If the superintendence of world order by the United States is in flux, its unparalleled capacity for military projection is not over yet.

The red guard of world order

Trump’s rapprochement with Russia is motivated in significant part to peel it away from economic integration and geopolitical alignment with China and create a breathing space for the US to confront its rise. While western commentators discover the language of imperialism to disparage its investment overseas, the idea that China threatens to replace the US as an imperial hegemon is fanciful. It serves as a useful story for the watchmen of US empire by misapprehending the colonial structure of the capitalist world economy and the history of China within it.

The United States’ position of global economic dominance is far from over. It retains its overwhelming position of influence in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation, and the US dollar remains the global reserve currency. From its participation in these institutions, initial reliance on initial foreign investment, up to the buying of US Treasury bonds China has developed as an integral part of this economic order. Since the pandemic, higher interest rates have drawn capital into the US, which has been an exception amongst global north countries as its GDP has grown to over a third larger than China’s.

International development author Sean Starrs has highlighted how even GDP comparison doesn’t encapsulate the persisting dominance of US-based capital in the ownership of global assets and transnational companies in particular. He highlights that even higher-value Chinese exports are dependent on ‘advanced components imported from other countries’ predominantly in the global north.

Studies of the economics of modern imperialism by economists Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi demonstrate a ‘persistent and long-term net appropriation of surplus value by the high-technology imperialist countries from the low-technology dominated countries’. They consider this group of dominating countries to constitute an imperialist bloc which still today closely resembles those identified by Lenin in 1915. They describe in essence a dynamic of relative surplus value extraction in the North joined to absolute surplus extraction in the South closely resembling the ‘dialectics of dependency’ described by Brazilian economist Ruy Mauro Marini. China has been a partial exception – still subject to a drain of surplus value west, it has nonetheless managed to climb the value chain in recent decades. 

China has begun to establish itself as a competing centre of capital accumulation which poses a structural challenge for this antecedent imperial bloc. This has been possible thanks to an earlier crisis of US hegemony, the collapse of Bretton Woods precipitated by the Vietnamese national liberation struggle. The internationalisation of capital which followed financed Chinese industrialisation without the scale of colonial or agrarian violence which has accompanied primitive accumulation in other centres of accumulation. 

In part by exploiting US-Soviet rivalry, China was able to secure this investment without acceding to the hegemonic tutelage of the United States or gutting of the developmental state. Instead, Communist Party control over much of the commanding heights of the economy and economic decision-making has been carefully maintained. This has enabled China to control periodic crises whilst reverse engineering imported technologies and investing in education and infrastructure to steadily climb the value chain.

The launch of DeepSeek at a fraction of the cost of US AI products has come despite US export limits on advanced semiconductor chips thought to be essential for such technology. China’s production of electric vehicles, solar and wind power, and rail networks puts Germany and Europe in the shade. In 2025 China will produce nearly twice the number of STEM PhD graduates as the United States, as higher education in the US begins to choke on Trumpist reaction. 

The scale of China’s industrial production and the resources at the disposal of its scientific and technical research programmes are unmatched. While China has far from achieved technological parity with the US, still relying on chip imports from Taiwan and other high-tech imports, it is steadily moving towards the cutting edge of the development of the forces of production. In purchasing power parity terms, a closer proxy for the production of use values, China’s GDP well exceeds that of the US. 

Overproduction in China’s construction sector, flush with money in response to the 2008 recession, is now being exported to global south nations through the Belt and Road Initiative. Such foreign investments ease internal crises of over-accumulation, secure markets for Chinese capital and debtors for Chinese state development banks. China has substantially increased military spending in line with GDP growth and its capacity for force projection, helping to secure overseas investments and trade routes. China has joined the US, France, Japan, and Italy in establishing an overseas military base in Djibouti and is considering building more. Disputes over territory in the South China Sea through which the vast majority of China’s international trade passes have damaged relations between China and its nearest neighbours, strengthening the US’ position in the Pacific.

Chinese state and capital acts at home and abroad with all the repression required to secure the conditions for continued national capitalist development. Yet as an incipient centre of capital accumulation, we should be wary of reading into this an overall advance based on the experience of established imperial powers. The history of China’s development, state form, and semi-colonial relation to global political economy manifests in its doctrine of non-interference, relative fidelity to international law and commitment to multilateralism. These have served as a defence against imperial dismemberment, not least in Taiwan, and given its absence of treaty allies beyond North Korea. Xi Jinping has said China is ‘ready to resolutely defend the UN-centric international system, stand guard over the world order based on international law’.

Chinese investment and finance to Global South nations are not accompanied by conditionalities to privatise, restructure and gut the developmental capacities of Global South states. The Belt and Road Initiative has laid the physical infrastructure for deepening South-South trade, motivating US investment in the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and developmental concessions to India. Chinese state development banks offer governments in the Global South with alternative lines of finance to the IMF, with China now the largest creditor of global south nations. These links are strengthened by increasing cooperation through BRICS as it inches towards a multilateral alternative to the US dollar.

In Latin America these developments formed a condition of possibility for the popular victories of the Pink Tide as well as its extractive limits. China’s rise is giving Global South nations room for developmental manoeuvre. None of this is revolutionary, but it does create breathing space for progressive and revolutionary forces by disturbing the colonial structure of the global circuit of capital.

China has begun to sell its US Treasuries in favour of gold, slipping to the US’s second largest creditor, while buying and pegging the renminbi to gold. It is not that the renminbi threatens to displace the dollar but that the dollar’s share of foreign exchange reserves has slipped from 65 per cent in 2017 to 57 per cent in 2024. The loss of the dollar’s status as a global reserve currency would threaten to pull the rug out from under the US’s substantial fiscal and current account deficits.

The trade war that began in 2018, the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act, IMEC, AUKUS and more all reflect a bipartisan consensus to address these vulnerabilities and undermine China’s development. The Trump administration’s drastic cuts to state expenditure and moves to impose tariffs are an attempt to get ahead of this. The administration is working to anticipate and so control the process of structural adjustment heralded by the relative economic decline of the United States, with the possible effect of accelerating it.

In the ruins of metropolitan hegemony 

China’s development has formed part of the extensification and intensification of capital’s subsumption of labour which forestalled the crisis of post-war capitalism whilst shredding metropolitan social settlements. As author John Narayan characterises it, we have seen ‘increased proletarianisation in the Third World and deindustrialisation and the increasing lumpen-proletarianisation in the First World’. The relative decline of established centres of capital accumulation threatens a revaluation of the labour and resources of the South as ecological breakdown threatens the use values they produce. In this respect cost-of-living crisis is an opening gambit in the struggle of Northern ruling classes to impose these costs on the working class.

As Narayan argues this constitutes a crisis of the wages of whiteness and nationality: the promise of sharing in the loot, glory and mythos of an imperial ruling class. As nativist and natalist reaction sweeps across much of the world, in the west far-right formations ‘promise to re-supply the wages of whiteness in the absence of wages’ even as they are singularly unable to deliver the exclusionary social settlement implied. 

Yet at the same time this crisis of whiteness and nationality has seen openings for a renewed mass anti-imperial and anti-racist politics evident in the Palestine solidarity movement and Black Lives Matter before it. Such movements confront a state hardened to social demands, more ready to respond with repression than concession. All about us bourgeois hegemony is cracking up as the state disarticulates from civil society, leaving it at once more brittle and deadly.

The ruling policy of the parties of order is that the public should discipline itself to the imperial interests of British capitalism before demands are granted a hearing. The best that trade union leaders can win from a Labour government is a watered-down package of predominantly individual employment rights as they demolish the social provision working class life depends upon. While myopic economism leaves domesticated trade union leaders cheerleading for British militarism, for most workers there are no wages of imperialism on offer and meaningful loyalty to the state is weak. If there was ever much for trade unions to show for making peace with British imperialism today they have nothing, and their roots in the class are shallow. This is an opening through which to carry anti-imperialist politics into the workplace and trade unions.

The popular hold of institutions such as the Labour Party which once contained and channelled class struggle within the bounds of class rule persists in little more than historical memory. Across the west declining electoral participation, Party membership, loyalty and engagement with state institutions mark a popular desertion of bourgeois politics. What passes for western political common sense and ’political science’ alike resemble superstitious relics of a bygone era.

The surge of anti-imperialism to seemingly unprecedented strength in the Labour Party under Corbyn and it’s even more rapid collapse are explicable only by the absence of a durable popular base. The support with which Labour won the election has proven as thin as their promises of change, with Reform and the far-right the primary beneficiaries. 

Starmer is also vulnerable to a challenge from an insurgent class politics which can give voice to rightful popular contempt for the political order. If any such political formation does emerge we must ensure that it exposes the empty promises of British imperialism for the working class, gives full-throated voice to mass solidarity with Palestine and confronts its repression with courage. 

As the global power exercised by the US state and capital has peaked, the camp of imperial retrenchment has won out. The institutions and norms of hegemonic collaboration with allies and formal respect for multilateral institutions are being abandoned. Each previous transition in world order has been punctuated by crisis and war – restoring the conditions for accumulation through a new configuration of capital’s global power at great human cost. These have been periods of revolutionary upsurge and daunting reaction. Socialists in the North meet this challenge in the example of steadfastness set by Palestinian struggle and join struggles from the South in making the end of US hegemony the beginning of the end for imperial domination.