International Developments: Liberation Road's 2022-2025 Main Political Report
Our assessment of key global trends and dynamics of this political period
As part of our 14th triennial Congress, Liberation Road adopted our 2022 - 2025 Main Political Report on June 1st, 2025. We will release the sections of the report in six installments over the coming weeks, prior to publishing the full analysis as a single, integrated report. This is part two: International Developments. We will add links to the other sections as they are released:
International Developments
SECTION 2: INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
2.1 Global Trends: Soaring Inflation, Populist Discontent, and a World at War
At a high level of generality, below are some key trends we witnessed in this three-year period.
A slowing global economy, soaring inequality and a cost-of-living squeeze
The economic rebound after the COVID pandemic was short-lived. What looked like a quick recovery turned out to be a “sugar rush”—a brief spike followed by slowing growth. In 2023 and 2024, global GDP growth dropped to just 2.6%, well below the pre-pandemic average of 3.5%, which itself was already down from pre-2008 norms. Despite faltering growth, financial markets soared: the Dow Jones bounced back from a dip in 2022 and continued hitting record highs. At the same time, global inflation jumped to nearly 8%. While it has since come down somewhat, it remains above pre-pandemic levels. Rising prices for energy, food, and other basics have caused a cost-of-living crisis, with three-quarters of people worldwide reporting concern about rising costs.1 According to Oxfam, nearly 800 million workers have seen their wages fall behind inflation, losing the equivalent of a month’s pay. Meanwhile, the very rich got even richer: the world’s five richest men have doubled their wealth since 2020, even as 5 billion people became poorer.
Increasing geopolitical tensions, state conflict, and extra-state violence
This period saw a sharp increase in war, conflict, and violence. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. Israeli’s ongoing genocide in Gaza now threatens to expand into a broader regional conflict amid escalating tensions with Iran. In Ethiopia, the Tigray War led to the deaths of an estimated 300,000-600,000 people. Globally, the number of active state conflicts rose to 59—a record high. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the world has never experienced so many state-based conflicts at once. Deaths from conflict reached their highest levels since the 1994 Rwandan genocide, with civilian casualties making up an increasing share. Non-state violence—committed by rebel groups, militias, and organized crime—also remained at historic highs. The increasing use of drone attacks, including robotic and autonomous systems, is transforming the nature of modern combat. Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, disputes between China, the Philippines, and Taiwan raised fears of US-China tensions escalating into outright war.
Resurgent migration, hardening borders, and regional blocs
After falling sharply during the early COVID years, migration has returned to historic highs. While economic opportunity remains the main driver, forced displacement is also at record levels: by 2024, more than 120 million people had been forcibly displaced. Seventy-five percent of them came from just five countries—Afghanistan, Venezuela, Syria, Ukraine, and Sudan. In wealthy countries with aging populations and low birth rates, immigration has helped stabilize economies. But right-wing forces continued to weaponize immigration to promote racism and nativism. For the first time, money sent home by immigrants (remittances) became the largest financial flow into low- and middle-income countries, surpassing even foreign investment. In general, borders hardened between global regions but lessened within them, as the European, Caribbean, and African Unions all took steps to increase internal freedom of movement.
Populist discontent with heterogeneous political results
Political developments at the level of the nation-state have been complex and contradictory. On the right, neofascism continued to grow as a powerful international trend. While each national variant has its own contours, common elements include claims of racist and ethnic superiority; xenophobia; anti-immigration propaganda; attacks on the gay and trans community; and attacks on democracy, civil society, and human rights. On the left, the new idiom of radical politics continues to be left populism, generally characterized by calls for social justice, democratization, popular sovereignty, anti-globalization, and to a certain extent anti-capitalism, but with less of an explicitly socialist character than traditional left-wing parties.
Right-wing authoritarian regimes consolidated power in Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. But they were weakened in India and defeated in Brazil and Poland. In Latin America, the left regained power in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, and retained it in Mexico, but lost ground in Ecuador, Argentina, and Paraguay, while Venezuela faced deepening crisis. In South Africa, the ANC lost its majority for the first time since the end of apartheid, only to form a coalition government with the majority-white Democratic Alliance. The far right continued to grow in Western Europe, while the left won victories in the Nordic countries and the Iberian peninsula. In many places, we might generalize that populist discontent with the failures of neoliberalism contributed to gains for “anti-establishment” forces on both the right and left. Elsewhere, however, the establishment clung to power.
Contradictory developments around gender and sexual equality
This period saw both progress and backlash around gender and sexual rights. Globally, there were small gains in gender parity across education, employment, and political participation, according to the Global Gender Gap Report. But the UN warned that “patriarchy is regaining ground,” citing rising rates of sexual violence, rape, and femicide—especially in war zones. Abortion rights were rolled back in the US, Poland, and Nicaragua—but expanded in Mexico, India, and Indonesia. Gender apartheid deepened in Afghanistan and continued in Iran, despite the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising—the largest challenge yet to that country’s Islamic regime. On LGBTQ+ rights, some progress was made: colonial-era anti-gay laws were repealed in Singapore, Namibia, and parts of the Caribbean. Marriage equality was legalized in Cuba, Greece, Thailand, and seven other countries—bringing it to 36 countries and 20% of the global population. But at the same time, persecution of LGBTQ+ people intensified in Russia, the Middle East, and much of Africa—often fueled by a transnational “anti-gender” movement backed by US-based Christian fundamentalist groups.
2.2 Structural Dynamics: Escalating Crises of Economy, Ecology and Empire
Liberation Road has long argued that we are in a period of structural instability. We believe the developments listed above both reflect and are related to deeper structural crises of economy, empire, and ecology. We outline these three crises below.
2.2.1 Economically, neoliberalism has faltered, but no new paradigm has emerged
Neoliberalism is a hegemonic project that emerged in response to the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s. Using the powers of national and international institutions (like the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and World Bank) it eradicated barriers to the free flow of capital, attacked the power of organized labor, shrunk and privatized social services, and deregulated the corporate sector. These policies devastated the world’s working class and poor, but resolved the crisis of profitability for the capitalist class, creating the conditions for a new cycle of accumulation that lasted for several decades.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, however, neoliberalism has itself entered crisis. Growth rates have been anemic, with an increasing divergence between faltering profits in the real economy and record returns in financial markets. Wealth has become concentrated in fewer hands, while debt has ballooned for individuals and governments. Waves of protest and anti-establishment populism have followed. Even former champions of neoliberalism—from the IMF to economists such as Jeffrey Sachs—have begun questioning its core ideas.
Yet no new economic model has taken its place—and most of the old models have been discredited. On the left, most 20th-century developmentalist and state socialist models have declined or disappeared, while attempts at building 21st-century socialism have struggled. Center-left efforts to revive the old Keynesian model have mostly failed. Right-wing nationalist models have run into the reality of a globalized economy, where even powerful countries have limited room to maneuver. Margaret Thatcher once famously argued that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism. Today, there are many competing alternatives, but none has yet managed to secure hegemony.
2.2.2 Geopolitically, the US-led world order has foundered, but no new order has replaced it
By 1945, the US had become the hegemonic power within the capitalist world system, with two-thirds of the world’s industrial capacity and three-quarters of invested capital. This position was threatened in the 1970s by the success of decolonial movements in Asia and Africa, economic rivalry with Europe and Japan, and the collapse of the gold standard amid the economic crisis of Keynesianism. However, the US was ultimately able to reconstitute hegemony by maintaining the (decoupled) dollar as the global reserve currency, assimilating economic rivals into new institutions like the Trilateral Commission and the Group of 7, and using the Third World debt crisis (itself brought on by US monetary tightening) to impose austerity on the Global South. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the hegemony of this new US-led “Washington Consensus” appeared absolute.
Today, however, US hegemony has deeply faltered. Immanuel Wallerstein argued that a state is hegemonic when it possesses productive, trade, and financial dominance. The US no longer leads in industrial production and has run a trade deficit for decades. Financial dominance remains, but it's increasingly fragile—and backed by massive debt.To these economic factors one might add military and ideological dominance—the twin weapons of coercion and consent. But while US military spending still surpasses that of all others, the US’s ability to control global conflicts has declined. Ideologically, the US pretense to act as the global defender of “freedom” and “democracy” has been shattered—by the Iraq and Afghan wars, by Biden’s failure to stop atrocities like the genocide in Gaza, and above all by Trump’s rise. While the US remains disproportionately powerful compared to other countries, it no longer truly leads them ideologically, politically, or economically.
Still, no new world order has replaced the old one. In the past, global hegemony passed to ever-larger economies—from the Dutch to the British to the US. Today, only China is large enough to potentially step into that role. But it’s unclear whether it can—or even wants to. Meanwhile the ongoing transnationalization of the circuits of production, along with the gradual emergence of a transnational capitalist class, have reduced the power of all nation-states relative to an increasingly global economy, albeit unevenly. Yet, however much capitalism has gone global, no effective system of global governance has replaced the nation-state.
Some now speak of a return to “multipolarity,” with competition between different “poles” that represent fundamentally different systems. But renewed inter-state conflict and competition should not be confused with a struggle between distinct “systems” representing alternative social, political, and economic “worlds.” In the mid-20th century, the capitalist and socialist blocs represented two such different “worlds” while at various points the more progressive leaders of the formerly colonized countries attempted to form a third one. Today’s rivalries look more like incoherent internal struggles within a shared (if collapsing) capitalist world system than battles between coherent alternatives.
2.2.3 Environmentally, the current “solutions” to the climate crisis have been discredited, but no rival option has secured legitimacy
The faltering of neoliberalism and US hegemony occurs as climate change is accelerating and the impacts of climate catastrophes are becoming more frequent. Wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters are becoming more frequent and destructive. At the same time, biodiversity is collapsing, threatening ecosystems, natural carbon sinks, and food security around the world. Temperatures are rising fast, heat records keep breaking, and by the end of 2024 the world had passed the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement. We are also rapidly approaching—or may have already crossed—other key climate tipping points. These are thresholds in earth systems (like polar ice sheets, ocean currents, or permafrost) that, if breached, could trigger large, irreversible shifts in the climate system. Once these changes begin, they can accelerate on their own, even if emissions are reduced later.
Nowhere are the failures of the current order more manifest than in its inability to address this crisis. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, most international climate action has focused on neoliberal market-based strategies—particularly incentives for renewable energy investment. In recent years, enthusiasm for “green capitalism” has declined sharply. Financial elites once interested in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing are pulling back, due to falling returns and rising pressure from fossil fuel lobbies. ESG itself has come under attack from both right-wing culture warriors and sections of capital who see decarbonization as a threat to profits. Globally, the extraction economy continues to expand.
At the same time, geopolitical conflict is undercutting global cooperation. The nations most responsible for historic emissions—wealthy countries of the capitalist core—have repeatedly failed to meet their own reduction targets. Rising powers often rely on fossil fuel-based development to grow, while underdeveloped countries are being told to “go green” without receiving the investment or infrastructure they would need to make that shift. The war in Ukraine and Israel’s expanding war in the Middle East have made things worse. Global energy markets are in turmoil, and the US has ramped up fossil fuel production—especially liquified natural gas exports to Europe—as a way to isolate Russia. This has further locked in fossil fuel dependency, at the very moment when rapid transition is most urgent.
All of this feeds a growing disbelief that current mechanisms can realize the emissions reductions required to meet international goals. And yet, no alternative model has been able to consolidate mass support or institutional power at scale. The global system is running out of legitimacy and time.
2.3 Hegemonic Interregnum and Instability
2.3.1 Cyclical, structural, or systemic crisis?
How deep is the three-fold crisis we’re in? Under capitalism, there are different types of crises—some that resolve on their own, and some that don’t:
Cyclical crises are recurring economic downturns that happen often and act as self-correcting mechanisms; that is, they largely resolve “automatically.”
Structural crises go deeper. They reflect major contradictions in the system that don’t fix themselves and require big changes to the way capitalism is organized.
Systemic crises are even more profound. These call the entire system into question—raising the possibility that capitalism could be replaced by a new system (revolution) or collapse outright.
So are we in a cyclical, structural, or systemic crisis?
After the 2008 financial crash, many people thought we were facing a structural crisis—that the global economy would have to be fundamentally restructured to recover. But no major restructuring took place. At the same time, we weren’t just facing a small, self-correcting cyclical crisis, because the situation has not restabilized; instead, the deepening economic, political, and environmental challenges have only gotten worse.
Some theorists now argue that we’re entering a systemic crisis—a turning point where the survival of capitalism itself is uncertain, and a revolution might take place. But replacing an entire system isn’t easy. As William I. Robinson notes, the ability to replace one system with another requires “a widespread belief that system change is attainable and worth fighting for, a revolutionary ideology and program, and organizations capable of leading the struggle for such change.”2 Right now, none of these things exist in a consolidated way. That’s one of the defining features of our current moment.
To make sense of this confusing period, we find it helpful to utilize a concept first developed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, called interregnum. The word comes from a Latin phrase meaning between regimes or “reigns,” and originally referred to the gap between the death of one monarch and the coronation of the next—an ambiguous period during which it was not clear where power and authority resided. Gramsci repurposed the term to refer to a period when the existing hegemonic structures had failed, but it was not yet clear what new ones could take their place. In his words: “the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
That’s where we are now. The old structures are no longer working for capital—but no new ones have taken their place. And until that changes, instability and confusion will continue to define the terrain.
2.3.2 Interregnum: the “blocked” crisis of neoliberalism
Drawing on Gramsci, Rune Møller Stahl distinguishes the concept of interregnum from our usual use of the word crisis.3 A crisis typically represents a turning point—something that forces change. For example, in medicine, a crisis is the decisive turning point in a disease, when it either starts to heal or leads to death. But an interregnum is different: it has no natural ending point. It is a time when a crisis remains unresolved for a long time, and no clear solution is in sight. In other words, an interregnum occurs when the resolution of a crisis appears blocked.
As Marxists, we understand that capitalism is unstable and full of contradictions. Still, we sometimes imagine history as moving neatly from one stable era to the next, with short periods of disruption in between. In contrast, Stahl points out that prolonged periods of non-hegemony have been almost as common as stable, hegemonic ones. He identifies the period 1930-1945 as one such era, and the period between the 1971 collapse of the Bretton-Woods system and the early 1980s consolidation of neoliberalism as another.
Our current era is a period of interregnum in this sense. It is a crisis—or series of crises—that won’t end without major changes. But what those changes will be remains unknown. This framework helps us understand why the current conjuncture feels so murky. Struggles have intensified, and yet their contours remain unclear and their outcome is deeply uncertain.
2.3.3 The deeper nature of our structural crisis
Compared to the interregnum of the 1970s, today’s instability runs deeper. Back then, the economic dominance of Keynesianism was collapsing, but US global political dominance remained intact. Our period is closer to the deeper interregnum of the 1930s, which saw both economic collapse and the crisis of Britain’s global political hegemony. At that time, however, the environmental crisis was not yet apparent. Today, by contrast, we face three major crises at once:
The economic crisis of a neoliberal cycle of accumulation that began in the 1980s
The political crisis of a period of US-led hegemony dating to 1945
An ecological crisis driven by industrial expansion and energy use that began in the late 1700s
Together, these overlapping crises make it much harder to imagine a new system that can bring lasting stability.
Importantly, we only recognize these interregnums as “turning points” in hindsight. In the moment, they feel chaotic and confusing. No one knows how or when the crisis will end. Different political forces offer different—and often conflicting—ideas about what’s broken and what should replace it. That makes politics more fluid than usual. Alliances shift rapidly. Strategies change. In hegemonic periods, by contrast, coalitions are usually more stable and differences among them are less meaningful because they operate within a shared framework, even when they disagree.
That’s why the political disruptions we see around the world should be understood as experiments. These are not fully formed orders competing for dominance; they are evolving efforts—some progressive, many authoritarian—to define what kind of order should follow the current crisis. Their internal logics are still being worked out, their alliances shifting. But the directions they take will help shape the next political era.
2.4 Situational Analyses: Ukraine, Palestine/Israel, Mexico, China
The above provides a very broad overview of some general global trends, as well as the overall structural dynamics they both reflect and reinforce. Below we briefly analyze a few specific international situations of particular significance to the US left, given direct or indirect US involvement in each: the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Mexico’s deepening transformation under the left-wing Morena government. These should not be taken as the sole or even the most significant events on the world stage; the sheer breadth of global affairs precludes us providing detailed analysis of many developments which merit further study.
2.4.1 The Israeli genocide in Gaza
More than a year after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks, in which just under 1,200 people were killed—most of them Jewish Israeli civilians—Israel’s war on Gaza continues, with full backing from the US. As of mid-2025, Israeli military operations have killed at least 50,000 Palestinian civilians—a figure widely considered to be an undercount. While Israeli officials claim the war’s aim is to eliminate Hamas, the broader goal appears to be the forced removal of much or all of Gaza’s population, through a combination of both direct genocide and displacement. In addition, Israel is now escalating ethnic cleansing efforts in the West Bank. This strategy reflects an intensification of the longstanding Zionist project of erasing Palestinian presence from the land—a campaign that has been ongoing since before the Nakba of 1948.
The US has played a central role in enabling this violence, providing financial, political, and military support with little meaningful constraint. That support has continued under both Biden and Trump, despite growing domestic opposition. Mass protests led by students, Arab and Muslim communities, and segments of the Jewish left have galvanized millions, and a majority of the US population now disapproves of the war. Yet this pressure has not significantly changed US policy. Since the war began, US military aid to Israel has reached a record $18 billion. At the same time, the Netanyahu government has acted with increasing autonomy—suggesting that Israel is no longer merely a US proxy state, but an emerging regional power pursuing its own agenda within a shifting global order.
Internationally, Israel’s legitimacy has eroded, especially in the Global South. In June 2024, South Africa filed a case with the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. Fourteen other countries—primarily in Africa and Latin America, but also including Belgium, Spain, and Ireland—have since joined the case. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and several members of his cabinet. This marks the first time a sitting leader of a US-aligned government has faced such charges—further underscoring the changing landscape of global power, and the declining ability of the US to unilaterally define the moral and legal terms of international politics.
2.4.2 The Russian invasion of Ukraine
In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, in clear violation of at least two treaties with Ukraine and of international law, escalating a conflict heightened in 2014 by the invasion and annexation of Crimea. Russia falsely claimed this was an act of preemptive self-defense against an “aggressive” Ukrainian government set on eradicating the country’s Russian-speaking minority, allegedly abetted by Western countries. In fact, it was Putin who had repeatedly made clear that he views Ukraine as a "national fiction" that has no right to exist. The invasion was thus an act of imperialist aggression with the aim of de facto or de jure annexation of Ukraine and the genocidal erasure of Ukrainians as an independent people with their own culture, language, and history. It is true that NATO expansion into eastern Europe over the past 30 years was a secondary factor in the conflict, and that the US’s invocation of anticipatory self-defense to justify its own invasion of Iraq created an unfortunate precedent that Russia could point to as cover for its aggression. But there was simply no imminent threat of Ukraine’s incorporation into NATO, and one imperialist war of aggression does not justify another.
After almost three years, the war has become a brutal one of World War I-style trench warfare, but with the addition of robotic and artificial intelligence systems that are rapidly transforming military operations. Russia has had the advantage in terms of its willingness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives. Ukraine has had the advantage of popular opposition to the invasion along with (until recently) support from the US and most NATO countries. Although international sanctions have had only limited impact on Russia’s economy, the invasion has drained Russia of material resources and weakened Putin’s influence over post-Soviet states and other former regions of influence, such as Syria.
In the aftermath of his reelection, Trump’s extraordinary pivot on Ukraine has threatened an end to continued US military assistance. While European allies are increasing financial and material support, they are unlikely to be able to make up the gap in the short to medium term, jeopardizing Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting. One possibility is a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine is compelled to accept at least some components of Russia’s land grab. Whether Ukraine subsequently joins NATO is now almost irrelevant, as Putin’s belligerence has all but guaranteed ongoing Ukrainian opposition to Russia, precluding anything like the 1948 Finland-Soviet neutrality agreement in practice (even if Ukraine finds itself compelled to claim neutrality in theory).
2.4.3 The “Fourth Transformation” in Mexico
In 2024, Mexico’s left-wing Morena party won decisive national majorities and nearly every governorship, deepening a process of transformation that began with the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) after 82 years of right-wing rule. Under AMLO and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico has pursued a national developmentalist model which has reversed the excesses of neoliberalism by bringing the energy sector back under public control and using public entities for large construction projects and state contracts, rather than contracting to the private sector. This has allowed the government to control prices and to use savings rather than new taxes to fund massive new benefits to the working class, such as doubling the minimum wage, raising pensions for the elderly, building new public hospitals and universities, and much more. Alongside these domestic advances, Mexico has laid down specific challenges to US imperialism, using trade with China and US reliance on Mexican goods as bargaining chips with the US, while gradually leading other Latin American countries towards the formation of their own independent economic bloc.
The reelection of Donald Trump increases the threats of US imperialism towards Mexico. Mass deportations, apart from their cruelty, scapegoating, and vicious racism, represent a real threat to the living standards of Mexican families who rely on remittances from family members working in the US. Many of those workers are former peasants, forced off the land and driven to seek work north of the border when the Mexican market was flooded with surplus US corn under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Should Trump’s policies result in a US-Mexico trade war, the impact on the living standards of the Mexican people will be equally serious. As access to US markets is curtailed, Mexico is likely to see capitalist disinvestment and mass layoffs. But workers in the US will not be spared. Millions on both sides of the border who earn their living in export industries could see their jobs placed in jeopardy.
Mexico’s success and the enormous popularity of Morena have been a bright spot on the international stage. Amid intensifying global contradictions, the Mexican model shows that right authoritarianism is not the only or inevitable reaction to escalating crises of economy, ecology, and empire. As a relative newcomer to the Latin American Pink Tide, Mexico now is its leader, since it alone has the overwhelming support of its people, and has the economic power to be able to withstand Trump’s bullying. More broadly, Sheinbaum has emerged as a widely admired leader in Europe and across the Global outh, boldly putting forward a vision diametrically opposed to Trump’s.
There are more than 37 million Chicano/Mexicanos in the US—a conservative estimate that does not include many without documents—one of the largest oppressed nationalities in the country. A large majority live in the areas of their historic concentration in the US Southwest that shares a border with Mexico. Liberation Road upholds the Chicano Liberation Movement as one of the key components of our strategy, guided by our line on self-determination for the Chicano Nation. Chicanos have deep historic and cultural roots with Mexico and continue to have direct connections with families and communities in that nation. Strengthening ties between Chicanos and movements in Mexico is a very important component of our internationalism. As Mexico’s fate is intimately bound up with the political and economic life of the US, defense of Mexico’s sovereignty and support for its progressive government is a crucial task for the US left.
2.4.4 The Complex Role of China
The following section examines China’s interactions and position within global affairs. We have refrained from commenting on China’s internal social, economic, and political system—about which there are a variety of positions inside Liberation Road, which merit further analysis and debate.
Often, the role of global hegemon has passed progressively to the largest capitalist powers, as in the transition from British to US global political and economic dominance. While China is already a major global power, and may achieve or aspire to greater regional hegemony, at present it seems unlikely that China will become the global hegemon, nor is it clear that it seeks that position. It has already achieved the level of productive dominance analogous to that of the US at the height of its post-war power. However, it is unlikely to achieve a level of hegemonic military dominance, and the non-convertibility of the renminbi (China’s official currency) means it is unlikely to achieve the kind of financial dominance the US has long held on the basis of the role of the US dollar. Amid escalating trade wars, the Chinese and US economies remain interdependent even as the US seeks to limit China’s growth and global influence.
China’s role in international affairs has been complex. Drawing on a long history of fostering south-south solidarity efforts, they continue to foster many important global peace settlement initiatives, as in their recent convening of many factions of the Palestinian liberation movement. At the same time, they have cultivated alliances with right-authoritarian regimes, like that of Putin, which has caused them to vacillate on other questions, and undercut the self-determination of Ukraine. The belt-and-road initiative is in some ways a classic example of soft power. Unlike US-backed neoliberal investment, this has been generally non-coercive: not imposed on countries, but offered to them on a voluntary basis. At the same time, these initiatives are undeniably capitalist in orientation—making use of cheap labor and exploiting
extractive industries, but also building much-needed infrastructure.
While Chinese financial investments have recently exacerbated the debt burden of some recipient countries, China has not leveraged its position to impose IMF-style structural adjustments, distinguishing their policies from the neo-imperialism of much Western financial investment. Globally, they are not an aggressive military power. Regionally, there are tensions and contradictions where they seek to assert their might, particularly within the South China Sea. Of great concern is the risk of military conflict with the US. The most active flashpoint has been around Taiwan. Trump’s position has been erratic: on the one hand, he has escalated anti-Chinese belligerence, while on the other, he appears to be considering abandoning the longstanding US commitment to Taiwanese sovereignty as insufficiently critical to US interests.
2.5 Trump’s Emergent Foreign Policy
At the time of writing, Donald Trump is breaking with longstanding US foreign policy positions, with enormous implications for the global order. This situation is still dynamic and uncertain. But some contours are becoming apparent.
Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision seems less a throwback to the 1950s Cold War order than a regression to the early 20th century—a revival of the stark, unrestrained imperialism that characterized the era before World War I. At the core of this vision is a rejection of the neoliberal, “rules-based” international order that successive US administrations helped construct over the past decades. Rather than global hegemony built on alliances, soft power, and multilateralism, Trump promotes a more primal and transactional model of empire—one grounded in domination, competition, and brute economic and military force. Yet paradoxically, Trump and his allies have flirted with building a different kind of transnational bloc—an alliance of illiberal, authoritarian regimes, a sort of "Fascist International."
In Trump’s view, international relations are inherently transactional. Alliances and treaties are seen not as enduring frameworks but as temporary deals that must yield immediate, tangible benefits to the US—or be discarded. Under this logic, international institutions like NATO, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization are considered obsolete unless they deliver short-term gain to the US. Trump’s approach calls not just for withdrawal from these bodies, but for their outright dismissal as constraints on American power. The very idea of a “rules-based” international system is rejected outright—there are no higher norms, only sovereign interests, with US sovereignty placed above all others.
Trump’s neo-imperial doctrine also revives older US expansionist ideologies, including Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, applied on a global scale. He asserts the US’s right to dominate the Western Hemisphere, including acquiring strategic territory and resources wherever necessary. But unlike earlier phases of US imperialism, this vision dispenses with any pretense of spreading democracy or modernizing foreign societies. Trump explicitly rejects the liberal imperialist notion of occupying and transforming nations “for their own good.” Instead, conquest is framed as a raw assertion of power.
Trump envisions a multipolar world composed of a few dominant empires—Russia in Eastern Europe and parts of West Asia, the US in the Americas, and China in East Asia—each surrounded by vassal states that serve their respective imperial centers. While Trump no longer imagines a unipolar world led by the US, he does insist that the US remain the largest and most dominant of the imperial states: the “biggest dog” in a world of rival empires. China is singled out as the principal threat to this position, especially in the Global South, where Trump views the struggle for influence as a zero-sum contest of economic and military domination. This helps explain Trump’s consistent overtures to Vladimir Putin, which may not only reflect ideological affinity but also a strategic effort to drive a wedge between Russia and China by realigning Russia with the US-led bloc.
Source: Euromonitor International Voice of the Consumer: Lifestyles Survey, fielded January to February 2023 (n=40,691)
William I. Robinson, Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (PM Press, 2022), p. 100
See Rune Møller Stahl, “Ruling the Interregnum: Politics and Ideology in Nonhegemonic Times,” Vol. 47, Issue 3 (2019) pp. 303–332