By Raffaele Sciortino

"Capitalism will fall like the Berlin Wall"

— José Francis Bergoglio (Pope Francis)

A genuine attempt at regime change is underway in Washington, retribution for the policies pursued globally for decades by the U.S. foreign policy community. While at first glance only chaos seems to reign, the challenge lies in identifying a fundamental logic within this chaos. Put another way, Trump is both a symptom and a product of profound material impulses, internal as well as external. More than this, he is the actor attempting to change the United States' strategic posture on the world stage — placing it on a new course and with outcomes that remain uncertain and difficult to predict.

In an immediate sense, Trump 2.0 is the product of three primary and tangible failures of the Biden administration: 1) its failure to inflict a "strategic defeat" upon Russia in the Ukrainian conflict, prompting instead Moscow's further rapprochement with China and a large part of the global South; 2) its failure to achieve a selective decoupling from China, by blocking the latter's technological modernisation and ascent in global value chains; 3) its failure to stem the deterioration of the domestic social context (despite its commitment to a "middle class foreign policy" and gestures toward reshoring, which in reality went no further than the beginnings of friendshoring with countries such as Mexico and Vietnam). In light of these failures alone, it is more than reasonable to suggest that it was Biden (whose measures, after all, were enacted in the protectionist wake of Trump 1.0) who has proved to be the parenthesis here. 

More than this, the failures of the Democratic administration can be seen not as contingent errors, but rather as the tail end of a long cycle of U.S. and global politics — namely, that of ascendent globalisation, which had already been severely shaken by the crisis of 2008. Today that cycle is coming to an end, having made the United States more dependent on a world that it continues to dominate, albeit with evermore serious economic costs (relative deindustrialisation and an unending trade deficit), with growing social polarisation and disintegration, and with the no-longer hypothetical risk that China may yet escape the still-prevailing imperialist mechanism of the dollar's withdrawal.¹ These are the deep and underlying causes of the increasingly evident "regulatory crisis" of the international system (of Pax Americana), the dialectical inversion of the domination wielded by what is in the strict sense the only imperialist power remaining on the scene — one capable of combining foreign investments abroad, world monetary seigniorage, global control of land, sea and space through full-spectrum military power, with a state apparatus that is extensively projected overseas.

Within the United States, the reaction to these failures was propelled by pressures coming from the depths of society intersecting with those stemming from important fractions of U.S. capitalism. The latter are those fractions that to date have been least favoured by global projection (the industrial sectors of "old" technology such as the oil industry), or a new generation of up-and-coming military industrial firms linked more closely to the tech industry (Palantir, SpaceX, etc.) and at odds with some large financial concerns. Nonetheless, it would be inadequate to look no further than this. The impulse from below, reaching well beyond the MAGA movement, is also a determinant factor in the change currently underway: a pressure that is undoubtedly an inter-class one (in particular, downwardly-mobile middle classes), but that also expresses social demands from important sectors of the (not only "white") proletariat, who are less and less inclined to endure the negative repercussions of globalisation.² This Trumpist assemblage is not yet a homogenous social bloc, and might never become one. For now, however, it channels proletarian expectations of defensive economic nationalism that — like it or not — fills the void left by the ghost of New Deal reformism.

Trump is the response to all this — in a situation that in some ways recalls Nixon's first term — through a strategy of reversing the Volcker shock of the early 1980s (the effective trigger of so-called financial globalisation driven by the dollar and the U.S. fiscal and current account deficits, paid for by the issuance of mountains of Treasury bonds). The nucleus of Trump's team, which is tighter than eight years ago, is clearly focused on the risk of U.S. decline, the need for a medium-to-long-term perspective able to accept sacrifices and returns that are not immediate ones, and the existential stakes of maintaining United States world supremacy. Going further, some of MAGA's leading exponents betray the sense of a broad-spectrum "crisis of (Western) civilisation" that extends well beyond a purely economic or geopolitical reading of America's crisis.

For now, between the ups and downs of pronouncements and measures, what's clear is a forcing from above that corresponds to the radical nature of the change envisaged. The strategy that is being laid out (at least in a provisional way, and with due caution) is that of "one step back, two steps forward". One step back on the diplomatic-military plane aimed at trying to avoid triggering a direct military confrontation with Russia and China (hence the search for an exit strategy from Ukraine — even better if this means a quasi-rapprochement with Russia — and efforts to ease tensions with Tehran), compensated by "reasonable diversions" (Panama, Greenland, etc.).³ For Washington, this involves taking a breather by acknowledging its present inability to wage war upon two enemies, as has been made clear by the Ukraine conflict — and here Trump has the support of important forces within the Pentagon. Two steps forward in terms of coercive economic diplomacy through zero-sum negotiations supported by tariff measures brandished like a big stick, by the devaluation of the dollar, and by the restructuring of foreign debt imposed on allies in exchange for military "protection" (as outlined by Trump's economic advisor Stephen Miran).

All this with the goal of relaunching domestic industrial production in strategic sectors in light of future major wars, under the guise of a "productivist" (rather than welfarist) defense of labour. Looking ahead in perspective, there are indications of a complete decoupling from China in the medium to long term, paid for by allies and friends financially (through hundred-year Treasury bonds), militarily (through increased purchases of U.S. weapons) and on the energy front (through the purchase of high-cost natural gas). Decoupling from China is seen by Trump's entourage as the only effective means of blocking or derailing the PRC's economic growth and social-political stability. The exorbitant tariffs imposed — and then partly suspended — in April are the first step, therefore, in differentiated negotiations with Beijing on the one hand, and the E.U. and friendly East Asian countries on the other. But even for the latter, the dismantling of part of their industry will become a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for the reconstruction of the U.S. industrial apparatus: a dismantling that will be partially compensated by selective friendshoring for some supply chains — even if these will be increasingly dependent on the U.S. sitting at the top of these chains, and with "Chinese" conditions for the workers involved. In other words, all of this envisages a reconfiguration of US Grand Strategy for a post-globalisation international order, which will leave plenty of dead and wounded in its wake.⁴

It would be naive to think that these medium- and long-term objectives can be easily obtained thanks to the dollar's leverage — which remains irreplaceable on international markets — along with the size of the U.S. domestic market. But it would also be naive to exclude a priori the feasibility of such a strategy by appealing to a U.S. decline understood in naturalistic terms (many leftists already predicted this incorrectly back in the 1970s). Certainly, Trump faces considerable obstacles. Domestically, there is a hostile state apparatus and foreign policy community (still able to spike his guns, as with Ukraine); the compact between the Federal Reserve and Wall Street (which has already thrown its weight around with Treasury bond yields); the negative repercussions for Trump's social base should there be a recession, which would energise those social sectors that have benefited most from globalisation (the urban professionals and middle class in digital and financial services, the world of media and tertiary education). Internationally: an undaunted China that for some time now has been restructuring its development model away from dependence on exports; the rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing, which by this stage will be difficult to break; the multi-alignment of the BRICS countries; the uncertainty of Germany's repositioning. Moreover, the situation in the Middle East could get out of hand in the face of Israeli ambitions that could drag the U.S. into a war with Iran, while negotiating an end to the Ukrainian conflict continues to appear far from easy. Put simply, given the unreliability of U.S. power, anti-American resentment can only be expected to grow, even in "friendly" countries.

But behind all this, the fundamental issue is the objective difficulty of grafting a neo-mercantilist logic (centred on the export of commodities) within an imperialist economic-social structure based on direct foreign investments and on the dollar as the de facto world currency that grants control over international capital flows, albeit at the cost of a growing trade deficit. This structure, which emerged following the end of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971, has been incredibly successful for the U.S. in terms of disintegrating the state and financial barriers of other states (in particular those of its allies, less so with China and Russia). Today, however, it risks disintegrating the U.S.' very industrial and social structure, which now discovers — as its main competitor — its own currency, considering the dollar's overvaluation and the FDI-induced de-industrialization!

In this way, the boomerang of imperialism returns to its centre, on a scale unprecedented within the historical parabola of capitalist imperialism. This also explains the surprising return of an unprecedented "national question" within the West, in the form of populisms and sovereignisms that are gaining momentum among the impoverished middle strata and proletarians seeking protections that the old workers' movement can no longer provide. Thus, the coexistence within proletarian sectors of (above all anti-Chinese) chauvinism and "neo-reformist" (especially anti-finance) demands — an ambivalence that the future will have to resolve.

If it's difficult to predict how things will evolve, we can more or less imagine two counterposed scenarios. In the first, as a result of the obstacles identified so far, Trump's efforts will end in chaos — with consequences as yet unforeseen, but certainly of great importance for the international order's already precarious stability. In the second, the success of the new U.S. strategy will lead to the formation of two opposed blocs: the first led by the United States, with a submissive Europe⁵, reduced to a sort of backyard (not unlike Latin America); the other around a China allied with Moscow, and more integrated with the East Asian economy. Even here, the unknowns will prove important, if only in a minor key, for the stability of dollarisation: what will Germany, Japan, South Korea, India, Turkey do? Both scenarios, through different paths, spell the end of globalisation as we know it, fostering a return to the control of capital and currencies (by strong state entities), and the multi-domestic reconfiguration of multinational companies. Rather than the beginning of a relatively stable multipolar international order, this would be a highly conflictual one, given the United States' more or less accelerated preparation for war against China, with a clampdown on Washington's allies and friends — something that we can see is already well underway.

In all this, the most interesting element is the return of a deep social crisis at the heart of Western imperialism, a return that foreshadows the possible reactivation of a passive, dispersed and fragmented proletariat. If we are looking for some necessary condition that could reopen the game on the level of class relations, through a possible resumption of class conflicts on a global scale, this would seem to lie in growing difficulties — both economic and geopolitical, including possible military defeats — facing the imperialist system's "strong link" (as Lenin might put it). With a systemic crisis of social reproduction on the horizon, will U.S.-centered imperialism be able to "unite the separated" (as Debord might put it)⁶ yet again?

Acknowledgment: This contribution benefited from the discussion within the Turin seminar on imperialism and with Steve Wright, whom I also thank for the translation.

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