[This article in an editorial by Foster for the March 2026 issue of Monthly Review.]
With the Trump administration’s backing down on its tariffs on China, its military abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, its insistence on seizing Greenland one way or another, its bombings in Nigeria, and its declaration that the official U.S. military budget will be increased by 50 percent in 2027—the last four events occurring in a two-week span in late December and early January—establishment commentators are all over the map. A common thesis being advanced, usually based on the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy report, is that the New Cold War on China has been abandoned, “peace” has been established in Palestine, and the Trump administration is primarily focused now on the Western Hemisphere. Others claim that Donald Trump’s America First policy has been replaced by raw power and the straightforward acceptance of great power competition. Not surprisingly, liberal analysts fail to see U.S. actions abroad (or at home) in terms of the long-term evolution of U.S. imperialism (Ali Wyne, “Washington’s China Consensus Is Breaking,” Lowy Institute, The Interpreter, December 18, 2025; Charles Miller, “USD Strategy Turns Inward Under Trump,” East Asia Forum, January 11, 2026; Katie Rogers, “Stephen Miller Offers a Strongman’s View of the World,” New York Times, January 7, 2026; White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, November 2025).
To make sense of present developments it is essential to understand the dialectic of continuity and change in U.S. imperial grand strategy. Following the Second World War, the United States emerged as the hegemonic power in the capitalist world economy, challenged only on the semiperiphery by the Soviet Union. The Cold War—the grounds for which were domestically prepared through the anti-Communist witch-hunt known as McCarthyism—represented not simply Washington’s attempt to challenge the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist states, but was an ideological umbrella under which it intervened against revolutions and anticapitalist movements around the world. The United States worked closely with the other historical imperial powers—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, which together with Canada today make up the G7—to undermine all revolutionary struggles around the globe. A strategy of military Keynesianism, promoting economic development through increases in military spending, was developed, allowing the U.S. monopoly capitalist economy to utilize much of its excess productive capacity, promoting faster economic growth, while forcing the smaller Soviet economy (which was operating on its production capacity curve) to divert much-needed resources to the military, thereby shrinking the production of consumption goods for its population. As a way of further isolating the Soviet Union, the United States under Richard Nixon exploited the Sino-Soviet split, introducing a reopening to China in 1971, which led in the next few decades to China’s reintegration into the world economy, spurring its rapid economic growth.
The return of economic crisis in U.S. and world capitalism in the 1970s with the waning of the Vietnam War and the demise of the dollar-gold standard ended the relative prosperity in the West and ushered in a period of secular stagnation and declining U.S. hegemony, countered in part by military spending and by the financialization of the U.S. and global economy. The resulting shift of the U.S. economy from production toward finance, characteristic of the neoliberal era, redistributed income both domestically and globally to the very top tier of capital in the imperial world, while worsening the conditions of populations everywhere and increasing the threat of financial contagion, instability, and meltdowns.
The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 significantly altered the world situation, allowing U.S. leaders to promote a “naked imperialism” aimed at U.S. unipolar dominance of the world. Regime change operations were carried out by the United States and its NATO allies against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Somalia, with repeated attempts to destabilize Iran. Washington pursued a long-term strategy of enlarging NATO to the borders of Russia, with the ultimate object (as articulated by former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski) of bringing Ukraine into NATO and creating the geopolitical basis for the fatal weakening and dismantling of Russia. In this “Unipolar Moment,” as it was called, U.S. military interventionism expanded on a historically unprecedented global scale. In the conservative accounting of the Congressional Research Service in 2022, the United States had carried out a total of 469 military interventions in its entire history, with 251—well over half—of these occurring since 1991 (Congressional Research Service, Instances of the Use of U.S. Armed Services Abroad, March 8, 2022; John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006]; “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: Preventing the Re-emergence of a New Rival,” New York Times, March 8, 1992).
The Unipolar Moment ended in the years 2007–2009. In his landmark Munich speech in 2007, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had been rebuilt to the point that it was now once again a great power and consequently the U.S. Unipolar Moment was over. Meanwhile, the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 shook the entire capitalist world, threatening a complete meltdown and irreparably damaging the notion of U.S. global dominance. As the core capitalist powers entered into depression-like conditions, the Chinese economy declined and then, pivoting, shot up again almost instantly in a V-shaped recovery. Hence, it became apparent that the Chinese socialist-directed hybrid economy was largely impervious to the deep downturns of the capitalist business cycle, with nothing seemingly stopping its rapid development. Between 1978 and 2015, China saw a thirty-fold increase in its GDP, displacing the United States as the world’s largest producer and exporter of manufactured goods, with China now the largest source of imported goods for two-thirds of the world’s nations (Vladimir Putin, 2007 Speech at Munich Security Conference [“The Putin Manifesto”], Air Force Magazine, April 2007, 62; Yi Wen, “The Making of an Economic Superpower: Unlocking China’s Secret of Rapid Industrialization,” Federal Reserve Board of St. Louis, Economic Research Working Paper Series, August 2015, 2, 114; Estéban Ortiz Ospina et al., “China Is the Top Import Partner for Most Countries in the World,” Our World in Data, December 8, 2025).
Seeing U.S. imperial dominance rapidly fading, the Barack Obama administration launched its imperial Pivot to Asia in 2011. However, any decisive action on its part was delayed by the changes occurring in the leadership in China, with Washington hoping Xi Jinping would be a new Gorbachev and deconstruct the Communist Party of China. Meanwhile, the Democratic administration sought to expedite its long-planned proxy war against Russia through the actual expansion of NATO to Ukraine, a process that was initiated by the U.S.-backed 2014 Maidan coup/color revolution, leading to an ethnic-based civil war in the Ukraine, which turned into a proxy war between NATO and Russia (John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific: An Introduction,” Monthly Review 76, no. 3 [July–August 2024]: 6–13; Thomas I. Palley, “The War in Ukraine—A History: How the U.S. Exploited Fractures in the Post-Soviet Order,” Monthly Review 77, no. 2 [June 2025]: 27–47).
The first Trump administration in 2017 represented a sudden shift in imperial grand strategy. Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement was a manifestation of the severity of the global crisis facing the United States as viewed by U.S. monopoly capital, particularly the high technology sector and finance. The chief concern was the failure to constrain China, as the new leadership under Xi moved to promote “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Evolving out of the Tea Party (which had arisen during the Great Financial Crisis), MAGA was the result of a billionaire-led monopoly capitalist mobilization of the enraged lower-middle class, increasingly isolated from both the upper-middle class and the bulk of the working class, on the basis of a revanchist ideology, leading to the neofascist Trump phenomenon. This resulted in increased anti-immigrant and racist/ethnonationalist policies. In the Trump Doctrine, as originally codified in 2019 by Michael Anton, a senior official in both Trump administrations, two “principles” stood out: an explicit ethnic nationalism in world affairs and a might-is-right approach to the pursuit of U.S. national interests abroad. More significantly, however, the first Trump administration launched the New Cold War on China, adopting a policy of promoting détente with Russia, while focusing U.S. economic, financial, technical, and military power on constraining and ultimately defeating Beijing (Michael Anton, “The Trump Doctrine: An Insider Explains the President’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy 232 [Spring 2019]: 40–47; White House, National Security Strategy of the United States, December 2017; John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018]).
The Biden administration, coming into office in 2021, continued the New Cold War with China, while also seeking to fulfill its goal of the enlargement of NATO in Ukraine, resulting in the Russian intervention in the Ukrainian civil war, and a more direct and intensified NATO proxy war on Russia. In their attempt to recalibrate U.S. imperial policy, the Democrats under Joe Biden shifted from a selective emphasis on international law to defending the U.S. “rules-based international order,” standing for U.S. dominated international organizations and economic and military alliances.
In contrast, the return of the Trump presidency, in 2025, led to the abandonment of any attempt to justify U.S. imperialism, substituting the iron fist of ethnic nationalism and raw power for the notion of a “rules-based [imperial] order.” The second Trump administration has sought either to end the Ukraine War or to Europeanize it, in order to concentrate U.S. economic and military firepower on China. The massive tariffs initiated by Trump had at their center the economic defeat of China, which was threatened with 125 percent tariffs. The new undersecretary of defense, Elbridge A. Colby, is the leading proponent of limited nuclear war with China within U.S. national security circles. Circumstances, however, forced Washington to back down on its tariffs on Beijing, which threatened to cut off the United States from rare earths, necessary for all high technology. Given the competition for AI dominance between the United States and China, this left Washington in an untenable position unable to carry out an overt aggression (See John Bellamy Foster, “The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism,” Monthly Review 77, no. 2 [June 2025]: 1–25; Ben Norton, “Trump Is Clearly Losing the Trade War with China, which He Started. This Is Why,” Geopoliticaleconomy.com, November 2, 2025).
Meanwhile, Washington’s unwavering support of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, led to a peace of the sword—whereby the United States, directing an International Stabilization Force and a “Board of Peace” in cooperation with Israel, is seeking to impose a form of colonial rule over much of Gaza. This has given Washington the breathing space to turn more fully to Latin America. The Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution initiated in the late 1990s gave rise to a socialist-oriented state and mixed economy, with a considerable communal sector—in a country with the greatest oil reserves on earth, which in 2025 was exporting roughly 600,000 barrels of oil a day to China. Latin America as a whole had drawn closer to China as a trading power, demonstrating its independence from the United States. Reestablishing complete U.S. imperial control of the Americas thus became a crucial stage in rebuilding U.S. geopolitical assets as part of the New Cold War with China.
Anton was also the author of the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States, with its emphasis on the imperialist Monroe Doctrine made even more lethal in the so-called Trump Corollary, which specifies that the U.S. militarily should intervene at will to protect its interests and to impose its complete dominance of the Western Hemisphere (seen as including Greenland). Still, in the deep background of the report lay the New Cold War with China, seeing Beijing’s defeat as the key U.S. goal. If there were any doubt as to this, the 2025 Pentagon report to Congress on China’s military, exaggerating the threat that it posed to the United States and portraying Washington as in an intense arms race with Beijing—together with Trump’s January 2026 declaration of a 50 percent increase in acknowledged U.S. military spending in 2027—made it clear that China was the ultimate target. The military abduction of Maduro, in contempt of international law and morality, was presented by the anti-Communist Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a strike not just against Venezuela but also against Cuba and China. Here it is significant that Venezuelan oil exports were being sold to China in yuan (renminbi) rather than dollars, thereby undermining the petrodollar, key to U.S. dollar hegemony, while some oil was also being exported to Cuba in return for Cuba’s provision of various services to Venezuela. The U.S. bombing of Nigeria was clearly tied to both U.S. extractivism and Washington’s strategic war on China, given that Nigeria is the world’s fifth largest producer of rare earth metals in the world, as well as the biggest oil producer in Africa. Greenland is eighth in the world in rare earth reserves, making it for that reason alone a major prize within the same global imperial strategy (U.S. Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2025; Costas Pitas and Andrea Shalal, “Trump Calls for $1.5 Trillion Military Budget in 2027, Up from $901 Billion in 2026,” Reuters, January 7, 2026; “The Top 10 Countries by Rare Earth Metal Production,” Investing News Network, March 25, 2025; “Rare Earth Reserves: Top 8 Countries,” Investing News Network, February 5, 2025; Daniel Chavez, “There’s More to Oil: Why Venezuela Demands a Deeper Analysis of U.S. Imperialism,” Transnational Institute, January 6, 2026, TNI.org).
Most threatening of all today is the Trump administration’s plan not to renew the New START treaty capping nuclear weapons, when it expires on February 5, despite Russian offers to extend the treaty—a decision it intends to defend in terms of combating China, which is not party to the treaty. Coupled with the New Cold War, ethnic imperialism, and the undermining of all attempts to mitigate climate change, the resumption of an unlimited global nuclear arms race spells an age of imperialist exterminism on a planetary scale. Under these circumstances only a worldwide revolt (or a series of revolts) emerging at all levels of global society can counter capitalism’s death instinct (Michael Klare, “Plunging into the Abyss,” TomDispatch, January 8, 2026, tomdispatch.com).
[John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of several books, which have been published in at least twenty-five languages. Courtesy: Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine published monthly from New York City since 1949, whose present editor is John Bellamy Foster.]
