One year into Donald Trump’s second term, the international situation is marked by renewed tendencies toward war, crises, and revolution (and counterrevolution). This is most acutely and prominently expressed in the genocide committed by the state of Israel in Gaza.
How might we characterize the international situation since the 2007–9 economic crisis? An “algebraic” analysis, following Lenin’s classic formulation of the imperialist era, would run like this: the development of class struggle has lagged behind the geopolitical, economic, and increasingly military conflicts between the world powers. This has manifested most prominently in the prolonged war between Russia and Ukraine-NATO, which is about to enter its fourth year.
But today that equation is changing. Since the crisis, the dynamic and determining factors have been the strategic competition between the United States and China and the accelerated dissolution of the “liberal order” overseen by Washington. Here, the most novel and significant development is the class struggle’s leap in quantity and, above all, quality. The international movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people has become an active factor, although not yet decisive. Europe is one of the international epicenters of these newly radicalized expressions of class struggle, in which the labor movement plays a significant role. The most advanced processes are in Italy, France, and, to a lesser extent, the Spanish state, along with a more or less persistent tendency toward general strikes and union mobilizations in Belgium and Greece.
Also contributing to this trend are the days of mass mobilizations in the United States against Trump — like the No Kings mobilizations, which brought millions into the streets — as well as radicalized vanguard actions against immigrant deportations and ICE, such as those in Los Angeles and Chicago.
Latin America as a whole is experiencing a moment of social crisis and political polarization, exacerbated by imperialist interference, which has become more aggressive, with an unequal class struggle (resistance against Argentina’s president, Javier Milei; revolt in Peru; strikes in Ecuador against President Daniel Noboa). Although these struggles have not yet reached the intensity of their international counterparts, explosive conditions may yet be emerging.
In Asia and Africa, youth revolts are shaking several countries. In the central countries, the labor and student movements are increasingly participating in political struggles. Meanwhile, new parties and tendencies are emerging to the left of “social liberalism” (a term that reflects the bourgeois transformation of the old social democracy and, in some cases, of communist parties, as in Italy). This may be heralding acute class confrontations and political radicalization. This is occurring amid a turbulent situation in which great-power rivalry, militarism, neoliberal attacks, and growing authoritarianism are the order of the day. From this point of departure, we present below an update on the main trends in the international situation, amid the disruptive impact of Donald Trump’s second term.
Dissolution of the (Neo)Liberal Order and the Interregnum
The international situation’s dominant feature is the accelerated dissolution of the “liberal order.” Having prevailed since the end of World War II, this order allowed the United States to exercise its hegemony over the “West” as the leading imperialist power. The peculiarity is that the leader in disrupting this order is not a “revisionist” power or bloc (an alliance led by China or Russia) but U.S. imperialism itself, led by Trump. In this role, Trump is less an agent and more a “morbid symptom” of a transitional and chaotic period marked by tendencies toward organic crises.
The capitalist crisis of 2007–9 revealed the exhaustion of neoliberal hegemony, the crisis of globalization, and the end of the “unipolar moment” of the United States, which enjoyed undisputed status as the world’s sole superpower after its victory in the Cold War. Globalization is in retreat, and supply chains are being reconfigured according to new criteria: regional proximity (nearshoring) and reduced geopolitical risk (derisking). Yet the international economy remains globalized — albeit in a more degraded form — and its structure is coming into tension with the Trump administration’s protectionist measures, which are now tending to become widespread. This clash is expressed not only by the tariffs but also, more generally, by the trade war with China, which translates internally into inflationary pressure, loss of markets for U.S. producers, and the erosion of Trumpism’s social base.
This exhaustion of global hegemony does not mean that neoliberalism has ceased to function. It continues as a capitalist offensive, with attacks on the living conditions of the working class, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, drastic cuts in public spending, and privatizations. This is the program of both the Far Right represented by Trump and Milei, as well as the variants of the bourgeois “center,” such as those represented by French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz. This hard core of neoliberalism persists as part of what economist Branko Milanović calls “national market liberalism,” which resists the crisis of the “free market” and “liberal democracy.” In the United States, this is combined with Trump’s promotion of a new paradigm of “patriotic investment” to demonstrate “loyalty to the nation,” even in the most globalized sectors of the elite, such as the asset-management firm BlackRock, which must invest in infrastructure, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence on U.S. soil. Well-known Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett even goes so far as to talk about “America’s new ‘patriotic’ capitalism.”
The rampant extractivism of both traditional powers such as China and the United States — which has put fossil fuels back at the center — shows an unprecedented appetite for strategic resources in Africa and Latin America (Trump’s interest in Greenland is also a reason for this). This not only exacerbates environmental damage but also contributes to escalating disputes and trade wars. The climate crisis, emerging from a more general ecological crisis resulting from the relations of capitalist production, is giving rise to socio-environmental disasters that have repercussions on global geopolitics.
The United States remains the leading imperialist power, supported by the two pillars of its dominance: the Pentagon and the dollar — which, despite its decline, remains the global reserve currency. For decades, however, the U.S. has been in a state of relative decline. So far in the 21st century, its share of global GDP has fallen from 30 to 25 percent. The strategic failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan further accelerated the erosion of its leadership and its ability to impose order. This acceleration of the crisis of U.S. hegemony is compounded by a disastrous public sentiment of a divided nation that has lost confidence in itself: almost 70 percent of Americans no longer believe in the American dream, the pillar of their national identity. This is a historical process with deep material foundations, one that can be delayed but is virtually irreversible by ordinary political means.
According to the theorist of offensive realism, John Mearsheimer, the main structural reason for American decline is the deterioration of its manufacturing power, one of the most visible consequences of globalization. In the same vein, Marxist economist Michael Roberts argues that the strategic objective of Trump’s protectionist policy is to restore the country’s industrial base and reduce its trade deficit. In this sense, Trump’s efforts are not too different from Biden’s “industrial policy.” Both point to the other major weakness, which is the United States’ enormous debt, which already stands at 100 percent of GDP — $30 trillion — and is close to exceeding the peak it reached during World War II. It is estimated that in 10 years, it will exceed $50 trillion (123 percent of GDP), with annual interest payments alone amounting to $1.7 trillion.
As a result, the destruction of unionized, well-paid industrial jobs has had a profound internal impact. It has created social polarization between a handful of winners and a large sector of losers — those displaced by the transfer of production processes to China and other regions with cheap labor, as well as by the restructuring plans and increased productivity pushed by corporations. This is concealed, however, by far-right populism, the hard core of the Trumpism. These pockets of “losers” — old industrial belts, abandoned interiors — exist in most advanced countries and broadly constitute the basis of the rising extreme right-wing variants.
Paradoxically, China’s rise and the United States’ accelerated decline were enabled by the very conditions that neoliberalism and globalization created under the leadership of the U.S. “hyperpower.” China, building on its comparative advantage (e.g., economic planning, which persists in its state-directed capitalist model), has transformed itself from a destination for corporations seeking cheap labor to an emerging power and strategic competitor to the United States. On the eve of the war in Ukraine, China and Russia made progress in consolidating a more or less formal partnership that goes beyond mere opposition to the United States, although Moscow’s growing dependence on Beijing has irritated the Kremlin’s leaders. This emerging alliance attracts countries in conflict with the United States, such as Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, even as it does not yet constitute a homogeneous bloc. Thus, for example, Russia has ratified a strategic partnership and cooperation agreement with Venezuela, focusing on the economic, energy, security, and cultural spheres; this reflects Moscow’s cautious approach, since it does not commit Russia to joint military action in the event of concrete threats, unlike its partnership with North Korea. Neither China nor Russia lifted a finger for Iran during the latest Israeli-U.S. military escalation.
In this new geopolitical constellation, space is opening up for regional powers such as India, Indonesia, and Turkey. The latter, especially, has had several geopolitical successes, such as its advance in Syria. Other member countries of the so-called Global South are gaining ground too, with ambitions to influence the course of regional events — and increasingly global ones, as in the case of nuclear powers such as India.
While there is widespread consensus on the liberal order’s terminal crisis, bourgeois analysts and scholars of international relations have tried to paint the complex transitional situation in a positive light, often through imperfect historical analogies. For example, some analysts argue that a kind of “bipolar world” has returned, a rerun of the Cold War in which the United States’ rival is not the Soviet Union but China. On a similar note, British historian Paul Kennedy predicts the emergence of a “tripolar world” with the United States, China, and India at the top, followed by a series of second-tier powers such as Japan, Great Britain, Russia, and France, along with other countries that will have to fight for their place. The novelty is that neither the EU nor any individual European power is at the helm of world power.
Others speak of a “multipolar world” to define this configuration of interstate relations, in contrast to the bipolar world of the Cold War and the unipolar world at the peak of U.S. hegemony. Although “multipolarity” is not a precise scientific category for defining the current state of imperialism, it describes an unstable moment in which the rivalry between the United States and China remains below the threshold of open contestation for world hegemony. Meanwhile, other intermediate powers are emerging, which in turn allows most peripheral countries to oscillate in their alignments and dependencies. Cases of unconditional alignment and extreme submission to the United States, such as that of the Milei government, are the exception and reflect a past era when the Washington consensus reigned supreme.
One of the clearest examples of fluidity in state relations and alliances is the international bloc known as BRICS+, particularly India’s system of trade and security alliances. The government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has recently moved closer to China, despite their historical rivalry, through its participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. At the same time, India maintains relations with Russia — which is its main supplier of weapons and which sells it discounted oil — thus circumventing international sanctions against the regime of Russian president Vladimir Putin, which led Trump to impose punitive tariffs. But it is also part of the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), together with the United States, Japan, and Australia, which aims to contain China’s advance in the Indo-Pacific region.
In addition to Trump’s tariff increase on India, other aspects of U.S. policy also make Modi uncomfortable. Among them is the U.S. relationship with Pakistan. Trump takes credit for achieving a ceasefire in the latest conflict between India and Pakistan, in May 2025, in which, although both sides claimed their share of the victory, India was left with a bitter taste. While Trump’s erratic policies — like his tariffs — are pushing India closer to China, Modi’s policy is not to escalate. In fact, Modi did not take any retaliatory measures, given that his ambitions for India as a global power are linked to the United States. His approach is therefore to manage his relations with China without sacrificing the fundamental interests linked to U.S. imperialism.
In this context, some sectors of the populist Left (and the bourgeois center Left) present “multipolarity” as a program to “democratize” state relations. “Campist” positions are being revived, according to which China (and Russia) play a progressive role, or are at least a lesser evil, in the face of U.S. imperialism. In reality, however, these are capitalist countries. China exhibits marked imperialist features, and like Russia, its regime is deeply reactionary, authoritarian, and anti-worker. These states do not represent any progressive alternative.
This new chaotic configuration of interstate relations, which lacks the unquestioned organizing factor of the United States, encourages militarism and rivalries between powers, which are still in a preparatory phase. It is in this context that a prolonged proxy war between Russia and Ukraine-NATO has unfolded, and in which Israel is pushing for a regional war in the Middle East while pressuring the United States to intervene militarily.
The United States’ attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities — meant to tip the balance in favor of Israel in the so-called 12-Day War — was empirical proof that the supposed “rules-based order” no longer exists. This means that the United States no longer considers it necessary to provide a veneer of international legitimacy to its imperialist interventions and that it claims for itself, as the leading imperialist power, the absolute right to use force without any disguise or “consensus” from the “international community.” The U.S. militarization of the Caribbean only confirms this reality.
These circumstances provide a great incentive for the development of nuclear weapons as the only guarantee against aggression, regardless of its pace and concrete possibilities. At the same time, the deterioration of the nonproliferation architecture, as more and more countries aspire to or seek nuclear capabilities, is a symptom of the crisis of nuclear deterrence. Once a relatively effective recipe in the era of a stable bipolar order based on Russian-American nuclear symmetry, it is now crumbling under the weight of several increasingly autonomous actors determined to play by their own rules.
From our point of view, the Gramscian category of “interregnum” is theoretically productive in accounting for a transitional period of sudden shifts, in which the old geopolitical map no longer serves as a guide. Yet our era lacks an event of the magnitude of World War II or the Cold War, or any revolutions or historic defeats, that would resolve the balance of forces and redistribute world power. Moreover, the decline of an imperialist power such as the United States cannot be equated with the hegemonic transitions of the past. What is clear is that, as Trotsky noted, U.S. capitalism, by “extending its power throughout the world … introduces into its own foundations the instability of the world capitalist system.” Today, faced with the unparalleled extension of its influence and power across five continents, the U.S. is experiencing a crisis of its hegemony, one that is destabilizing the entire world system, as shown by the panic of the European bourgeoisie.
Trump 2.0: Imperialism Reloaded and “America First”
Trump’s two presidencies — especially the second — constitute a kind of “forceful solution” to the crisis of U.S. hegemony and its reflection in domestic politics. According to Trump’s vision, traditional trading partners and allies have taken advantage of the United States as the guarantor of world order, burdening it with the cost of financing the collective security of the “West” through NATO and the U.S. military across some 800 bases around the world. Most of these military resources are deployed in Europe, where there are 80,000 to 100,000 U.S. soldiers. As a legacy of the Cold War, Europe has thus outsourced its security to the United States without assuming the cost. This scheme entered into crisis with Trump’s arrival in the White House. With his hostility and threats to abandon NATO and its commitments — such as generously financing Ukraine’s armament and ultimately guaranteeing its security — Trump forced European powers to increase military spending, first by 2 percent and then by 5 percent of GDP.
In reality, contrary to Trump’s rhetoric, the U.S. presence in Europe after World War II was essential to consolidating American hegemony, not only keeping Moscow at bay but also preventing the reemergence of Germany. It is often said that NATO was created “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The war in Ukraine, by brutally cutting off Russia from western Europe, especially Germany — which has seen its own eastern ambitions damaged — eliminates a central concern of U.S. grand strategy. At the same time, Moscow’s difficulties in Ukraine — where it has yet to stabilize and maintain control over the 20 percent of territory it occupies — are convincing Washington that Russia is no longer a threat, despite the hysterical cries of European governments, which are more concerned about American disengagement than the scope of the Russian threat.
Foreign policy remains a source of dispute and division within the imperialist establishment, although what unites all Republican and Democratic factions is the strategic objective of containing China’s regional and global advance, which both consider the main threat to the United States.
“America first,” complemented by references to Reagan’s formula of “peace through strength,” is an attempt to halt (and, as far as possible, reverse) the trend of historical decline in the United States. The Trump administration aims to do so by radically changing imperialist policy. Rather than “directing” the world order, it wants to return to a sort of “spheres of influence” approach.
This is not classic isolationism in the sense of retreating behind national borders, although there are isolationist factions in Trump’s government coalition. These factions, represented by emblematic MAGA figures such as Steve Bannon or the vice president himself, are engaged in a silent war with the neoconservative sectors that have converted to Trumpism, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio as their main representative. On a more positive note, we could say that “America first” is a reckless search for balance between reducing and redefining the United States’ international role. It is an attempt to buy time abroad to fight enemies at home. Alternatively, and sometimes at the same time, Trump favors one side or the other, which gives his imperialist foreign policy an erratic, sometimes contradictory character.
Beyond the divisions within his administration, Trump must find a delicate balance in his efforts to relaunch the American empire, navigating the competing interests of nationalist sectors focused on manufacturing and capitalist factions with global interests.
The U.S. president has made uncertainty a hallmark of his foreign policy. He maintains a policy, then replaces it with the opposite the next day simply by posting on social media. Even his most trusted operatives, such as Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East, are friends, family members, or private business partners, sometimes outside the state apparatus. This sui generis method, which is somewhat unorthodox to say the least, gives the appearance of improvisation and a lack of strategy, calling into question the credibility of U.S. imperialism.
Trump’s goal is to avoid involving the United States in foreign wars (and even more so in “nation-building” policies) in which U.S. “national interest” is not directly at stake, while strengthening militarism and reaffirming dominance in its backyard — the so-called Western Hemisphere — with an eye on the strategic dispute with China. This policy has become more radical since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, which has made it clear that the United States is not in a position today to wage a major war (let alone several major wars simultaneously) because the war industry cannot support it.
This explains the heightened imperialist policy toward Latin America, where the United States has lost ground during the years of the “war on terror,” and China has advanced not only in becoming the first or second trading partner of most countries in the region but also in investing in sectors considered strategic.
In the first year of his second term, the U.S. president is seeking to create an image of U.S. dominance to compensate for the structural decline of imperialist leadership. He is doing so through a rudimentary system of rewards and punishments based on the imposition of tariffs and economic sanctions and the threat of military force. The aim of this kind of “transactional diplomacy” is to negotiate bilateral agreements that are more beneficial to U.S. capitalism, especially with allies who are most vulnerable to Trumpist pressures thanks to their varying degrees of dependence on the U.S. market. This was evident with Canada, Mexico, and, above all, the European Union, which ultimately accepted a 15 percent tariff while lowering tariffs on U.S. imports to zero.
The White House’s bullying may bring short-term benefits, but strategically it contributes to deepening the decline of U.S. leadership and encourages states with ambitions to follow suit in accumulating power.
The aggressive imperialist policy and Trump’s triumphalist narrative are a masquerade for the United States’ relative weakness. Maximalist threats are usually followed by backtracking, as happened with the so-called Liberation Day, when Trump threatened to impose punitive tariffs on the entire world. After nearly triggering an economic crisis that threatened to take down Wall Street, he backed down and agreed to negotiate. This policy of threatening to unleash hell and then backing down earned him the nickname TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), coined by the cream of financial capital.
So far, the use of force, as in the U.S. intervention in Iran’s “12-Day War,” has served a strategy of deterrence. The trick has been to show overwhelming strength and determination in using the most powerful conventional weapons to discourage enemy regimes from taking reckless action and to discipline unruly allies. It is a sort of “bomb and run” approach, which avoids committing ground troops to risky missions or “regime change” operations that involve prolonged occupations (like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are highly unpopular with society in general and with Trump’s organized base in the MAGA movement in particular). The same logic has so far applied to the militarization of the Caribbean, where some of the most powerful imperialist aircraft carriers and destroyers are concentrated, primarily as a threat to Venezuela, although, so far, they have bombed only precarious boats that pose no military threat and may not even be linked to drug gangs.
In short, with offensive imperialist rhetoric and some spectacular actions that, for the moment, do not entail significant political-military costs, Trumpism as a raison d’état implies a certain recognition of the limits of the U.S., which can no longer play the role of “world cop.”
The Trumpist Pax: The Failure in Ukraine and the Fragile Truce in the Middle East
Trump claimed he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, but after almost a year in office, he has not yet managed to get Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to even negotiate a ceasefire. The war is bogged down. Although the conflict has settled into a slow war of attrition, with the military balance long tilted in Russia’s favor, Ukrainian attacks persist, aiming mainly at Russian energy facilities. Trump’s strategy seems to be reduced to changing tactics. First, he humiliated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and demanded that Ukraine return the funding given to it by Biden. Then he threatened Putin and imposed new sanctions on Russian oil after the failure of the Alaska summit, only to then once again deny Zelenskyy offensive weapons.
The war in Ukraine has lost the centrality it had during Biden’s presidency. After Trump’s election, the administration withdrew from the day-to-day management of the Ukraine-NATO side and began bilateral negotiations with Putin to reach a ceasefire. Trump’s aim is to oblige Europe to take over the management of this conflict. But even if the European powers wanted to do so, they know that the only country that can guarantee Ukraine’s security is the United States. Meanwhile, Paris, Berlin, and London are watching each other closely; behind their warmongering rhetoric in favor of Ukraine, each is trying to prevent the other from benefiting from the U.S. withdrawal. As the war continues, dangerous incidents have taken place, such as the repeated violations of Polish and Romanian airspace by Russian drones, heightening the risk of escalation.
These twists and turns reflect the United States’ inability to impose the terms of a peace agreement on Russia without escalating militarily. As a result, we have seen the evaporation of the “Trump effect” — that is, the belief among most of the U.S. population, and probably also among Russian leaders, that the new U.S. president would bring about rapid change. Nearing its fourth anniversary, the war in Ukraine has already surpassed the duration of World War I for Russia, given that in March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk marked the Bolshevik exit from the war. For Ukraine, open warfare combined with the previous eight years of irregular warfare has destroyed the country’s social fabric and its very character. Economically, and even more so demographically, the country is on its knees, a tragedy from which, at best, it will not recover for decades.
In the Middle East, the genocide in Gaza continued for another year. Netanyahu’s warmongering policy expanded Israel’s war fronts to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, until — in an action intolerable to the United States — Netanyahu bombed the capital of Qatar to eliminate the Hamas negotiators who were in Doha negotiating a ceasefire orchestrated by Trump himself.
The United States’ unconditional alliance with Israel was never in question, but Netanyahu’s coalition with far-right settlers pushed the situation toward a “final solution,” which in this context refers to the continuation of genocide, the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, and the annexation of Palestinian territories to form a “Greater Israel.”
Despite the Zionist Far Right’s affinities for Trump, this plan was unacceptable to the White House because it called into question the interests and geopolitical objectives of U.S. imperialism in the region: to expand the Abraham Accords and achieve a reactionary “normalization” between Israel and Arab states, which would allow the development of important business deals already underway. From a military point of view, the U.S. administration also considered the annexation of Gaza to be strategic suicide. That’s why this plan was quickly deactivated by the U.S. president, who accepted the reservations expressed by the Israel Defense Forces, which believed that entering the tunnels of the Strip would condemn them to years of unsustainable and endless guerrilla warfare. The attempted stabilization of the region included the U.S. policy of resuming negotiations with the Iranian regime, which has been severely weakened by the losses it suffered as part of the “Axis of Resistance,” decimated by Israeli attacks that decapitated both Hamas and Hezbollah.
This is the context in which Trump decided to impose a ceasefire in Gaza, disciplining Netanyahu and his partners, who have reluctantly given up their ultimate goals for now. But before yielding, Trump staged several shows of force, such as the vote in the Israeli parliament on the annexation of the West Bank.
Two elements have been central to Washington’s decision to halt the genocide in Gaza and resolve the hostage crisis. One is geopolitical: Israel’s attack on Qatar, a key U.S. ally, home to the main U.S. military base in the Middle East, and a partner that plays a diplomatic role on Washington’s behalf by facilitating negotiations with Hamas. As part of this process, Qatar achieved a series of significant advances: an agreement similar to a U.S. security guarantee, a formal public apology from Netanyahu, and a U.S. commitment to enforce Israel’s cessation of hostilities in Gaza, even before Hamas’s control over the Gaza Strip had been dismantled. This was a major diplomatic setback for Israel and a regional triumph for the alliance between Qatar and Turkey.
The second element relates to class struggle: the genocide in Gaza became the main driver of a pro-Palestinian movement in the core countries, with clear elements of radicalization, such as the strike in Italy, which became a domestic political problem for the governments allied with Israel and supporting the genocide. In the U.S. in particular, there has been a significant and steady decline in support for Israel, among both the general public and legislators. Across the political spectrum — whether they are “woke” or pro-Palestinian leftists or MAGA nationalists — a whole generation of young Americans sees Israel as a country that does nothing but create wars, problems, and humanitarian disasters, consuming a significant portion of the United States’ financial resources.
Thus, the agreement marked a retreat from the openly fascist plan of ethnic cleansing and genocide and a reversion to a reactionary paradigm of maintaining colonial occupation and the quotas of an “incremental genocide” that have defined Israeli policy for decades.
The “20-point plan” for Gaza is more of a truce than a peace plan, which for now focuses on the first, most urgent stage of easing tensions in the form of returning hostages and limiting the genocide, including the entry of humanitarian aid to mitigate the famine. Although this was undoubtedly a relief, Gaza is in a kind of “neither peace nor war” limbo, as Israel continues its attacks, especially in the West Bank.
The next phases of the plan are subject to negotiation. Clearly, Israel did not achieve its objective of winning a total victory over Hamas, which still exists and remains armed, and which, in order to remain a force for order, has also taken advantage of the ambivalence of Trump’s plan and Israel’s unwillingness to implement it. Disarming Hamas has proved nearly impossible, and there is little credibility to the far-fetched idea that Gaza should be governed by an international consortium headed by Trump and former UK prime minister Tony Blair, along with foreign troops, particularly Arab ones, who would eventually have to confront Hamas. As a result, the so-called Kushner plan, which envisions a bifurcated Gaza, is beginning to gain ground. According to this plan, one part of Gaza, presumably the area beyond the Yellow Line, will be rebuilt and managed by the Israelis. The other will be left to its own fate, in other words, to Hamas. The goal is to increase pressure on Hamas by inserting an intermediate stage between phase one and phase two of the Trump plan, consisting of threats and the effective use of force, useful for further weakening the Palestinian organization and perhaps forcing it to disarm. Above all, the proposal exempts the IDF from entering the tunnels, relying on its ability — and that of the Israeli intelligence services — to monitor Hamas’s movements without necessarily having to disarm all its fighters. Additionally, Netanyahu has so far prevented Turkey from entering Gaza to recover the bodies of the dead hostages, that is, turning the Strip into a Turkish base, a devastating scenario for Israel.
More generally, at the regional level, although Israel has succeeded in weakening the Shiite axis led by Iran, the influence of Qatar and Turkey is growing in parallel, especially in Gaza and throughout the Middle East — an emerging trend that constitutes a strategic change with implications for Israel’s security environment. Already, the Turkish and Israeli media are clashing from a distance over the issue of northern Cyprus, defined by leading Israeli analysts as “our problem.”
Finally, Israel’s so-called eighth front: the internal one. Israel entered the war amid deep social divisions in 2023. Disputes over the conduct of the war — whether to prioritize the release of hostages or the defeat of Hamas — and the debate over the “day after” have exacerbated ideological divisions. These divisions continue to fragment Israeli society along political, religious, and cultural lines, even reaching highly professionalized state apparatuses such as the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and the IDF itself, which does not bode well for the future of the Zionist state.
The continuation of Israeli attacks in Gaza and the West Bank, and the bombings in Lebanon, show that the truce is fragile and that the United States is still far from its goal of normalizing and stabilizing the Middle East.
The Domestic Limits on Trumpist Bonapartism
The Trump administration has deepened its Caesarist repression by pursuing a more brutal immigration policy, transforming ICE into a force answerable only to the president, ideologically persecuting universities, attacking democratic rights (an effort disguised as “anti-wokeism”), deploying the National Guard to Democratic cities, making McCarthyist attacks on the Left — and more generally on Trump’s political opponents — which intensified after the assassination of far-right figure Charles Kirk, and the persecution of the movement in solidarity with Palestine. Trump has also attacked the union rights of public workers.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of this strong authoritarian tendency was the meeting convened by the president and his “war minister” with the top 800 generals and military cadres. There, Trump presented the “internal enemy” as a priority target and called for the use of American cities as training grounds for imperialist wars. Previously, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, announced the restoration of the “warrior ethos” and “high physical standards.” Hegseth decried what, in his view, had become the “the Woke Department”: the troops had supposedly been softened by decades of gender or racial quotas instead of merit-based recruitment, “out-of-shape generals,” diversity and inclusion policies, guidelines for “not offending anyone,” and “long beards and hair.” This caused concern among senior commanders, who shy away from the politicization and partisan use of the military. Even General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appointed by Trump himself, opposes ending deterrence in Eurasia to prioritize homeland defense. No one considers it urgent to devote themselves to domestic tasks if it compromises preparedness to deal with external crises. In response, the government has the weapon of purges at its disposal. More than 20 senior officers, mostly Black and female, have been dismissed, and it is possible that the tightening of physical standards will serve to punish those who do not adapt to the administration’s priorities. Above all, Trump’s strategy is consciously aimed at redefining and expanding the traditional limits of executive power.
Everything would seem to indicate that Trump has overestimated the electoral mandate he received at the polls. While concern about illegal immigration has not disappeared, most Americans disapprove of the brutal treatment and deportations of immigrants. For example, nearly two-thirds oppose arresting and detaining undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States without a criminal record. Nearly six in 10 agree that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents “should not be allowed to hide their identity with masks or use unmarked vehicles when detaining people.” About two-thirds oppose the U.S. government’s deportation of undocumented immigrants to prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya without allowing them to contest the deportations in court, and for the first time in history, as we mentioned earlier, U.S. public opinion also questions the unconditional alliance with Israel.
As a result, Trump has quickly squandered his political capital. More people disapprove of his administration (54.4 percent, versus 43.4 percent who approve). This discontent was expressed in the streets, particularly during the two No Kings marches, which were massive but peaceful protests, as well as more radicalized actions, such as the days of rage in Los Angeles against immigrant deportations and the activism against ICE in Chicago.
What is new is that, in just a few months, the unrest has reached the white electorate that ensured his victory in 2024 and that now sees that its economic situation has not improved while the billionaires of the big tech and financial companies, who constitute the capitalist core that supports Trump, have seen exponential profits. Contrary to campaign promises, prices have not only failed to fall, but inflation is once again increasing as a side effect of the trade war. Added to this are layoffs in the public sector caused by Elon Musk’s chainsaw, the loss of social security subsidies, and the defunding of the food stamp program, on which some 42 million Americans depend.
The sustained loss of support recorded in the polls was ultimately reflected in the monumental Republican defeat in the first three elections of Trump’s second term, which could foreshadow a GOP defeat in the 2026 midterm elections, potentially leading to a loss of control of Congress.
In the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, centrist Democratic candidates with ties to the security apparatus won by margins of 15 and 13 points, respectively. And in the New York City mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani, the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” candidate of the Democratic Party, won with a program based on popular demands, such as rent freezes and free transportation and childcare services. During his campaign, he condemned the genocide in Gaza, which aroused the militant enthusiasm of broad sectors of the youth.
Unlike in 2016, Trump not only controls the Republican Party but also concentrates all state power: the executive and Congress (he has a slight majority in both houses), together with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which nevertheless intends to play its own game. For example, the court could vote against Trump’s power to impose tariffs by decree on the grounds of national security, thereby returning this power to Congress, which would deprive the White House of one of its main tools of external coercion.
Ultimately, Trumpism is an unstable form of Bonapartism because it is not based on a decisive defeat in class struggle, nor has it managed to establish a more solid institutional base within the armed forces.
Trade War, Weak Growth, and a New Bubble
For the third time since Trump returned to the White House, the United States has stood down in its trade dispute with China. This long-running trade war seems to be taking on a “stop and go” dynamic, alternating between moments of tension or mutual retaliation and episodes of truce.
The summit between Chinese president Xi Jinping and Trump at the end of October 2025 allows us to draw two conclusions. First, neither the United States nor China is willing to go all the way in the short term. Trump has made it clear that he wants the trade conflict with China to stay out of his way for a year so he can focus on winning next year’s congressional elections. And, at least for the next year, Xi is as interested as Trump in maintaining a stable relationship. The Chinese economy is mired in deflation, and about a third of GDP growth now comes from exports, which have held up surprisingly well this year despite U.S. tariffs. Maintaining that growth in 2026 will be more difficult, as tighter access to the U.S. market has forced exporters to sell in other markets where they have less pricing power. A trade truce will help them regain some market share in the U.S. and make it easier for Xi to manage his unstable economy.
Second, unlike in Trump’s first term, when China was taken by surprise, it has clearly learned the technique of escalation, applying the same Trumpist strategy by using access to rare earths — where it has a qualitative advantage — as a tool of coercion. China’s quasi-monopoly in this area acted as a kind of equivalent to the semiconductors with which Trump (and Biden) sought to limit China’s access to advanced technology. China dominates the export market for the extraction and refining of rare earths, which are indispensable for the batteries used in arms, electric vehicles, and various devices. The United States lags far behind and was seriously affected by this restriction imposed by China, threatening to impose 100 percent tariffs — a threat that was not credible, if only because of the unsustainable impact such tariff barriers would have on the U.S. economy itself.
Trump backed down for the simple fact that China played a winning card. According to estimates by Goldman Sachs, China’s not-so-secret weapon is its control over 70 percent of the extraction, 92 percent of the refining, and 98 percent of the manufacturing of magnets made from 17 chemical elements that are essential to a wide range of industries, from electric-car and cell-phone batteries to the manufacture of fighter jets, drones, radar equipment, and missiles.
China won this round. For the first time, it has achieved a significant victory by using its influence in the rare-earth sector to force Washington to back down on export controls. For Beijing, this means that the days when the U.S. could sanction China with impunity are over. Trump removed many of the tariffs he had imposed over the Chinese government’s alleged unwillingness to combat fentanyl trafficking (the U.S. accuses China of facilitating access to chemical precursors). Trump also lowered other tariffs on China, which now average 47 percent, which is extremely high by “free market” standards but represents a reduction of about 20 percent. In exchange, China relaxed access to the rare-minerals market for one year. It also agreed to buy soybeans from U.S. farmers, who had practically lost this market.
As most analysts point out, the summit with China left the United States in the same position as it was in before “Liberation Day,” calling into question the usefulness of a mechanism that sectors of financial capital, through their mouthpiece the Wall Street Journal, consider the “dumbest trade war” in history.
The pause in the trade war could last for a year, but the logic of confrontation remains in place, so the war could resume at any time. It is not just a matter of tariffs; there are geopolitical and military factors that could disrupt the truce. Among them are the dispute over the South China Sea and the issue of Taiwan, which were undiscussed at the summit. Meanwhile, the United States has maintained its policy of hindering China’s trade relations with third countries.
Although the trade war did not have the catastrophic impact that tariffs were predicted to have, given that threats and tariffs alternate with setbacks and truces, the IMF’s October 2025 update indicates that the economic outlook is bleak. It projects average growth of 3.2 percent for 2025 and 3.1 percent for 2026, with average growth of 1.5 percent for advanced economies and just 4 percent for emerging economies. This mediocre performance is influenced by prolonged uncertainty, protectionist policies, sovereign debt and headwinds, potential corrections in the financial market, and, above all, political instability and geopolitical risks — all of which threaten global stability.
The other major threat is the bubble created around AI, which accounts for no less than 80 percent of U.S. stock market gains and 40 percent of economic growth, meaning that a crisis in that sector would have devastating effects given this concentration. When three major banks — Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan — merely warned of a likely market correction in the near future, stock markets dropped worldwide, demonstrating the economy’s volatility.
Latin America: Imperialist Offensive, the “Donroe Doctrine,” and Gunboat Diplomacy
Latin America has once again become a priority for U.S. foreign policy and one of the battlefronts in the trade and geopolitical dispute with China, which has made advances not only in trade relations but also in strategic investments in the region, such as the port in southern Peru linked to Brazil, which effectively establishes a bi-oceanic land corridor, and the space station in Argentina for deep space observation.
For the United States, the region is fundamentally important for controlling migration flows, especially along the southern border with Mexico, which is one of the cornerstones of Trump’s policy.
In this context, the Trump administration launched a renewed imperialist offensive to regain control of its backyard, at a time when it has few allied governments. The two main countries in the region, Mexico and Brazil, have governments that, while willing to negotiate and make concessions, are not aligned with Trump’s extreme right wing. This leaves Milei’s Argentina as its unconditional ally and as the third most important country in the region. The U.S. then has lesser allies — El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa — and is betting that the current electoral cycle will favor right-wing variants, as seen in Bolivia with the dislodging of the MAS from power.
The use of punitive tariffs as a new form of exercising power also extends to the North American continent, including Canada. Loyalists are rewarded, and it is made clear that any challenge, regardless of its magnitude (e.g., not accepting deported immigrants), comes at a price. Trump blackmails Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum government by imposing or raising tariffs and even taxing remittances from Mexican citizens (which amount to 4 percent of Mexico’s GDP) and threatens direct intervention if Mexico does not limit imports from China or collaborate with the “war on drugs” and border control. The Mexican government concedes, albeit with a negotiating stance. Trump also threatens Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, imposing sanctions and raising t