Trumpism is not an accident or an aberration, but the first explicit doctrine of American imperial decline. Tracing the path from unipolar triumphalism to strategic contraction, Marcus Halaby argues that the US ruling class is learning how to rule a smaller, harsher and more openly hierarchical world – and that anti-imperialists must learn how to understand this new reality.
The end of the American century
Donald Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) marks a decisive new phase in the development of American imperial policy. Previous such documents wrapped US power in the language of liberal internationalism, multilateral leadership and universal values. This one dispenses with such pretences altogether.
It speaks instead in the blunt language of sovereignty, civilisation, borders, economic self-interest and hemispheric control. In the process it does not merely signal a change of tone or of administration. Rather, it registers a formal recognition of the disappearance of the “unipolar world” that followed the collapse of the USSR and the repeated failure of successive attempts to preserve it.
Trump’s strategic vision is best understood as a conscious attempt to manage imperial decline. For three decades, US power has been progressively undermined by structural shifts in global capitalism. Among these have been deindustrialisation at home, the rise of China as a systemic rival abroad, repeated military overreach and the erosion of the nation-state’s ability to regulate capital, borders and populations.
Trumpism emerges from these conditions as a response by some parts of the US ruling class – infrastructure, extractive, defence and tariff-protected domestic capital in particular – to the perceived failures of both neoconservative and liberal interventionist militarism and diplomacy.
Trump’s NSS therefore crystallises a broader realignment already under way. It abandons the ambition of global leadership in favour of defensive consolidation. It accepts a “multipolar world” in the process of being divided into spheres of influence. It redefines national power in demographic, cultural and economic terms. The document describes this posture as “flexible realism”: an explicit rejection of universalistic ambitions in favour of calibrated, priority-driven power.
The centre of gravity of US imperial strategy has thus shifted from expansion to the containment of populations and dissent and the management of borders and expectations. This shift has significant implications for class struggle, international conflict and anti-imperialist politics. It requires us to understand Trump’s strategy not as some anomaly explicable by his own seemingly mercurial personality, but by situating it within the long decline of US hegemony.
The unipolar moment: universalism as strategy
The collapse of the USSR left US imperialism in a position of unprecedented global dominance. The 1991 Gulf War, prosecuted under George HW Bush, was less a conventional conflict than a public exhibition of overwhelming military superiority, alliance discipline and technological command. It announced the arrival of what Bush Senior called a “new world order”, in which no rival power appeared capable of challenging US leadership militarily or economically. The accompanying rhetoric, expressed in the intellectual sphere in the form of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”, suggested not just victory in the Cold War but the permanent stabilisation of US hegemony.
Under Bill Clinton, this confidence was translated into a comprehensive reorganisation of global capitalism. Trade liberalisation, financial deregulation, NATO expansion and the consolidation of institutions like the World Trade Organisation were presented as neutral and technocratic steps towards prosperity and peace – in much the same way that US-promoted decolonisation in Africa and Asia after 1945 once was.
Decolonisation allowed US capital to penetrate the former colonial empires of its exhausted European rivals-turned-allies. Neoliberal globalisation likewise entrenched American dominance by extending the reach of US financial, legal and corporate power deep into the former Eastern bloc. It also had consequences for a Global South now deprived of the option of using the USSR as a weak and inconsistent source of protection.
Liberal “internationalism” in this period functioned not as an alternative to imperial coercion but as its preferred mode of operation. Subordinate states were integrated into US-dominated markets and US-led security structures rather than disciplined primarily through force.
Yet the very success of this project created the contradictions that would later undermine it. The globalisation of production accelerated deindustrialisation in the imperialist metropoles, weakening the domestic social base of liberal hegemony. China’s incorporation into the world economy (while profitable for multinational capital) laid the foundations for the emergence of a systemic rival.
At the same time, the increasing mobility of capital eroded the ability of nation-states to regulate economic activity or to control borders. The unipolar world thus rested on quite fragile foundations, masking vulnerabilities that would become increasingly visible in the decades that followed.
The neocon gamble: pre-empting decline through coercion
In this context the neoconservative current that crystallised around the Project for a New American Century was not an expression of American imperial confidence but an anxious response to its fragility. Emerging in the late 1990s, this project began from the recognition (then still relatively rare in the US political class) that the unipolar world would not sustain itself automatically or indefinitely. Its proposed solution however was not to adapt to the structural limits of American power but to try to override them through the demonstrative use of military force.
Their strategy advocated overwhelming violence, regime change and a forward military presence. The belief was that this would discipline allies and deter the emergence of rivals, thus securing the conditions for continued US dominance. The spectacular attacks on New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001 – masterminded by the Saudi jihadist and former CIA asset Osama bin Laden – provided the ideal political opening through which this vision could be implemented.
The “War on Terror” pursued by President George W Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq was therefore not simply “retaliation” for al-Qaeda’s violent exposure of US weaknesses, nor even a pre-emptive act to prevent its repetition elsewhere. Rather, it was an attempt to reassert imperial credibility through demonstrations of unchallengeable power intended to stabilise a world system already displaying signs of fatigue.
In effect, the neocons thought that Bush Junior could use the opportunity presented by 9/11 to “finish the job” they believed his father had left unfinished in 1991. And this was understood not just in the narrow sense of marching on Baghdad to remove Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein. The broader vision was one of taking advantage of the temporary absence of any credible global rivals to occupy, reorder and police geopolitical spaces whose future might otherwise enable the emergence of new challengers.
At its most extreme, neocon thinking expressed itself in quite grandiose spatial fantasies. One notable example is Ralph Peters’ provocative essay “Blood Borders”, published in the US Armed Forces Journal in 2006.
This article toyed with the idea of completely redrawing the map of the Middle East. Its stated ambition was to produce a new imperial cartography that might prove to be more stable than the accidental creations of Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s Francois Georges-Picot in the aftermath of the First World War.
It stands as an illustrative extreme that reveals the underlying assumptions of neocon thought in general. Its key theme was a willingness to imagine existing states and regimes (and indeed entire regions) as malleable raw material for imperial redesign, rather than as historically established facts with complex sets of relations of their own.
Far more commonly, neocon ambition manifested itself in the elasticity of the “enemy”. Excited pundits frequently advocated the extension of the War on Terror to a shifting rota of symbolic adversaries like Iran, Syria, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Somalia, Venezuela, North Korea and Zimbabwe. “Terror” thus functioned less as a defined threat category than as a licence for coercion, one that could be applied to almost any state or movement resisting incorporation into US strategic priorities.
Rhetoric aside, the neocon project should be understood not as a full departure from the liberal interventionism of the Clinton years but as a more visibly coercive variant of it. A key example of this can be seen in the form of Britain’s then prime minister Tony Blair.
Blair took part in Clinton’s “humanitarian” military intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and led one of his own in Sierra Leone the following year. His readiness to lend his own liberal interventionist language and reputation in support of Dubya’s wars demonstrated the continuity between these two schools of thought and their ability to align in practice.
Where liberal interventionism sought to integrate states into US-led markets and institutions, neoconservatism aimed to drag the more recalcitrant of them in through military force. Both operated on the shared assumption that US-led Western supremacy could be preserved indefinitely through the correct combination of violence, diplomacy and institutional design.
The failure of this gamble was not simply military or moral but structural. The prolonged occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq visibly drained US resources. This both weakened established alliances (most notably with the “Old Europe” derided by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003) and exposed the limits of US power. Instead of deterring rivals, Bush’s wars merely accelerated strategic overstretch and signalled vulnerability. Russia and China did not learn submission from Iraq but caution, asymmetry and patience.
Crucially, the neocons did not fail because they misunderstood the dynamic of long-term US decline that they hoped to offset but because they sought to escape it through coercion alone. They certainly grasped capitalist rivalry as a contest between great powers, just one that they thought could be settled through demonstrations of force and will. This left them trying to arrest the rise of rival centres of accumulation without addressing the material transformations – of production, accumulation and global integration – that were generating them anyway regardless of US military action.
The collapse of this project thereby narrowed the range of options available to subsequent administrations. It did not restore Clinton-era liberal hegemony but instead created the conditions for a prolonged period of strategic hesitation, elite division and increasingly improvised efforts to manage imperial decline by other means.
Obama’s moment of stasis
Barack Obama took office amid the visible exhaustion of the neocon project. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had discredited the fantasy of permanent primacy secured through force, while the global financial crisis of 2008 exposed the fragility of the global economic order that underpinned American hegemony. Obama’s presidency was therefore not a restoration of the liberal interventionism that accompanied neoliberal globalisation in its earlier and more confident phase but an attempt to manage the consequences of globalisation’s breakdown.
Obama’s foreign policy combined rhetorical restraint with strategic caution. The administration sought to reduce the visible costs of imperial overreach by drawing down large-scale ground deployments, by avoiding new occupations and by emphasising diplomacy, multilateralism and targeted force. Drone warfare, special operations, sanctions regimes and proxy conflicts became preferred instruments: less spectacular than the neocon wars, but no less coercive. This was not an abandonment of imperial power but its reordering under conditions of diminished legitimacy and constrained capacity.
At the same time, Obama’s proposed “pivot to Asia” (combined with his expressed desire to “reset” relations with Russia) signalled a formal recognition that China’s rise posed a systemic challenge to US dominance. Yet this recognition did not translate into a coherent strategy capable of arresting or reversing that shift.
Obama’s administration lacked both the domestic political coalition and the material resources required to confront China decisively. Its key weakness was that it remained bound to an economic architecture that continued to deepen US-China interdependence. The pivot thus remained partial and contradictory: more acknowledgement than resolution.
Moreover, Obama’s plans were regularly diverted by the contradictions at the heart of his administration. These were often seen to take the form of tensions with his first Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But they were far more fundamentally the consequences of divisions between a “realist” school in the Pentagon wary of new or unbounded military commitments and a more traditionally liberal interventionist school in the intelligence and diplomatic communities, fearful of missing out on opportunities to influence events.
The “Arab Spring” revolutions of 2010-11 provided the liberal interventionists with their first policy victory in the form of the overthrow of Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Obama had been caught out by the sudden fall of Tunisia’s pro-Western dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011. He also left it almost until the last moment to be seen to have “switched sides” when a popular revolution removed Egypt’s tyrant of three decades Hosni Mubarak from power less than a month later.
The outbreak of revolution in Libya only six days after the fall of Mubarak – and its rapid descent into civil war – provided an opportunity for US power to improvise a speedy demonstration of its continued relevance, in an oil-rich Arab state no less. It also allowed US diplomacy to seek to rehabilitate its carefully crafted “democratic” image for the benefit of a newly radicalised Arab public opinion.
It did not take long however for the Pentagon realists to come to regret the consequences of the CIA and State Department interventionists’ victory. The collapse of Gaddafi’s praetorian apparatus of repression left little behind in the way of a functioning state machine, effectively reproducing the chaos of post-invasion Iraq. This left the seemingly “victorious” Western coalition that helped Libya’s revolutionaries topple Gaddafi without a mechanism for bringing about a counterrevolutionary “stabilisation”, in the way that Egypt’s US-backed military had with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s coup in July 2013.
Instead, Libya entered a new round of conflict between a popular Islamist-influenced government in the capital Tripoli (supported by Turkey, Qatar and occasionally by Italy) and a more conservative military-aligned regime in Tobruk (supported by Russia, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE). The September 2012 Islamist attack on a US diplomatic compound in Libya’s second city Benghazi provided the Pentagon realists with a stick to beat the interventionists with, while the overall picture in Libya helped to inform their opposition to any similar attempts at “regime change” elsewhere, in Syria in particular.
Domestically, Obama proved unable or unwilling to reconstruct the social foundations of liberal hegemony that had been eroded by decades of deindustrialisation and worsening inequality. His administration stabilised the financial sector and oversaw the restoration of aggregate growth but failed to materially transform the conditions of regions hollowed out by neoliberal globalisation.
The grievances produced by these processes were neither invented by the right nor resolved by liberal reform. Indeed, many of them had first been registered and commented on by left-liberal cultural figures like filmmaker Michael Moore, and of course by US socialists and trade unionists.
Without a credible contender for political power to articulate a response to them they just festered, increasingly detached from any promise of redress. The failure of the radical self-described “socialist” Bernie Sanders to displace Hillary Clinton from the Democratic candidacy for the 2016 presidential election ensured that the Democrats were tainted by Clinton’s strong association with many of the causes of popular discontent. This in turn more than helped the new radical-reactionary right that coalesced around Trump to appropriate these concerns.
Obama’s presidency therefore marks a moment of strategic stasis. It recognised the limits revealed by neocon overreach without articulating a viable alternative capable of reconciling global commitments with domestic legitimacy. Obama thus functioned as a bridge between eras, presiding over the transition from imperial overconfidence to imperial uncertainty.
The inability of liberal interventionism to renew itself under these conditions did not end American imperialist intervention. It did however clear the political terrain on which Trumpism would later emerge, as a more openly coercive and unsentimental response to the same underlying crisis.
Russian opportunism and the end of unipolarity
The overthrow of Gaddafi also damaged Obama’s attempted “reset” of relations with Russia. It fuelled Russian suspicions that the US would continue to pursue the same hostile policy towards present Russian or former Soviet client regimes that so damaged relations under Clinton and Bush.
Syria’s subsequent revolution and civil war posed similar challenges. Obama’s policy was almost characteristically inconsistent, tolerating (and occasionally interfering in) the arming of the Syrian rebels by the US’s Turkish and Gulf Arab allies while avoiding direct US military involvement. This provided a resurgent Russian imperialism with the opportunity to exact revenge for Libya and Iraq with a forceful direct intervention of its own.
By supporting Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to the hilt, Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin sent a powerful signal to the Arab regimes, dictatorial and monarchic alike. This was that Russia under his leadership was a far more reliable and consistent imperialist sponsor than a US imperialism obliged to engage in hypocritical cant about democracy and human rights – one far less likely to cut and run at the first sign of popular opposition or domestic discontent.
Putin was quite skilfully able to expose Obama’s weaknesses and his real priorities. Obama’s regular excuse to his Arab and European allies for refusing to intervene directly in Syria had been that the US had no reason to unless the Assad regime crossed US “red lines” by using chemical or biological weapons. By gassing rebel-held Ghouta in August 2013 on a scale that was too large to be seen to ignore, Assad thereby (intentionally or otherwise) called Obama’s bluff.
What Assad and Putin discovered in the aftermath was that Obama was far more concerned about the risk of “instability” arising from the consequences of the Arab Spring than he was about removing one noisy Arab despot whose objective threat to US power was in completely inverse proportion to his regime’s anti-American rhetoric.
This set of priorities later acquired concrete form with the rise of Islamic State, an outgrowth in Syria of the Sunni-sectarian jihadist wing of the armed resistance to the US occupation of Iraq. This provoked a direct US military intervention that Assad’s genocidal war against his own people had not.
This US intervention, however, was conducted increasingly alongside and in an often-strained direct coordination with Russia. It also involved regular if indirect coordination with an Iranian regime that Obama reached a historic deal with over its controversial nuclear programme.
The failure of the US and Western anti-war movements to oppose the “war on terror” that was happening in Syria instead of the “regime change war” that wasn’t happening hopelessly confused and rendered useless a whole layer of activists for the best part of a decade. It also alienated the Arab and Muslim diasporic communities that had once been a core part of the base of support for anti-war politics in the West, by equating “anti-imperialism” with the glamorisation or soft-soaping of murderous tyrants.
Obama’s biggest provocation from the standpoint of Russian imperialism however came in Ukraine in February 2014. Nationalist protests in which far-right forces played a major role had forced the pro-Russian strongman Viktor Yanukovych into exile. The outcome was a new Western-supported pro-EU regime in Kyiv whose ideology and economic programme quite spontaneously repelled much of Ukraine’s large Russian-speaking minority.
Ukraine’s new regime quickly found itself bogged down fighting a Russian-backed insurgency in the Donbas region in the country’s east. Putin also took the opportunity to seize and annex Ukraine’s Russian-majority Crimea region, exploiting similar arguments about national self-determination to those used by Blair and Clinton to justify intervening in Kosovo in 1999.
Trump’s first presidency: from paralysis to decline management
For all the rhetoric that he would “Make America Great Again”, Donald Trump’s first presidency abjectly failed to reverse American imperial decline. Instead, it made explicit a strategic orientation that had already been forming under the surface during the Obama years: an acceptance that US power could no longer sustain universal leadership and that the task of the state was therefore to manage contraction rather than to deny it.
Trumpism emerged not as a populist insurgency but as an elite adaptation to this reality, one that dispensed with the ideological consolations of liberal internationalism and the overreach of neoconservatism alike.
What the 2025 NSS later formalises under the label of “flexible realism” is the doctrinal expression of this shift. Rather than claiming universal leadership or transformative ambition, flexible realism prioritises hierarchy, selectivity and transactional advantage. It treats international commitments not as obligations flowing from a rules-based order, but as instruments to be activated or discarded according to their utility.
In foreign policy terms, Trump rejected both the humanitarian rhetoric that was used to justify liberal interventionism and the transformational ambitions of neocon militarism. He expressed open scepticism towards regime change, multilateral commitments and permanent alliances, viewing them as liabilities inherited from a bygone era of American predominance. The symbolic hostility to NATO, the transactional treatment of allies and the willingness to countenance withdrawal from longstanding theatres like Afghanistan all reflected a reordering of priorities rather than “isolationism” in its purest sense.
This reprioritisation also involved a deliberate strategy of burden-shifting and the regionalisation of security. Allies were pressed to assume greater responsibility for their own defence, while the US signalled a preference for enforcing a narrower sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere in place of underwriting global stability. Security was to be tiered and prioritised, not universalised.
At the same time, Trump’s administration intensified forms of coercion that were compatible with decline management. Sanctions regimes (targeting Iran in particular) were expanded. Economic pressure was elevated to the level of grand strategy. Targeted military actions were retained as instruments of signalling rather than of transformation.
The killing of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 exemplified this approach. It was a dramatic assertion of force designed to deter and intimidate, but without any conscious intention of immediately initiating a wider war, still less of undertaking any postwar reconstruction on US terms.
The symbolic strikes on Assad regime targets following the gas attacks on Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 and on Douma in April 2018 followed a similar pattern. These also allowed US power to recover some of the prestige that Obama had traded in return for “stability” in the aftermath of the 2013 Ghouta massacre. Hard power was not abandoned, but its purpose was narrowed significantly.
Trump’s approach to China revealed both continuity and rupture with his predecessors. Like Obama, he recognised China as the primary systemic rival to US power. Unlike Obama, he abandoned the pretence that this rivalry could be managed within existing multilateral frameworks. Trade wars, tariffs and economic nationalism replaced integrationist rhetoric, signalling a shift from trying to shape global capitalism to openly contesting its outcomes. This did not resolve the contradiction of deep US-China interdependence, but it did mark a decisive break in tone and intent.
Russia, by contrast, was treated as a secondary and manageable concern. Trump’s repeated expressions of interest in accommodation with Moscow reflected a hierarchy of threats rather than just ideological affinity. From the standpoint of decline management, Russia appeared less as an existential enemy than as a potential counterweight to China, potentially even as a problem to be neutralised through disengagement. That this generated resistance within the US security apparatus demonstrates the persistence of older strategic reflexes rather than their viability.
Domestically, Trump’s administration instrumentalised popular grievances without resolving them. Deindustrialisation, regional decay and demographic anxiety were mobilised rhetorically to stabilise an elite project oriented towards economic nationalism without delivering durable material gains to its base.
Trump’s noisy and often irrational MAGA movement was mobilised as a source of legitimacy but by its class nature could not possibly function as an independent political force. Its support was maintained through highly visible conflicts over immigration, race and national identity that provided moments of alignment without altering underlying economic conditions.
This approach could secure episodic loyalty but not lasting consent. The result is a movement prone to disillusionment as expectations go unmet, and therefore vulnerable to fragmentation into more radicalised and conspiratorial splinters. These currents may increasingly exert pressure on the regime from the right, as the underlying causes of their original discontent remain unresolved.
Trump’s first term thus marks the moment when American imperial strategy moved from hesitant adjustment to the overt acknowledgement of its own limits. This set the stage for a deeper reordering of priorities that would be codified more formally in his later return to office.
Biden’s failed liberal restoration
Joe Biden’s presidency represented an attempt to restore a form of American leadership that Trump had openly repudiated, but without the material or political capacity required to sustain it. Where Trump’s first term made explicit the limits of US power, Biden’s sought to deny or to soften them, reasserting the language of alliances, values, democracy and multilateral leadership associated with the post-1945 order.
In this sense, Biden functioned as the mirror image of the strategic vision later codified in Trump’s 2025 NSS: an effort to revive universalist claims at the precise moment when the conditions for enforcing them had already been eroded.
Biden’s foreign policy reinstated familiar tropes of liberal interventionism. The US re-embraced NATO, recommitted to the defence of a “rules-based international order” and framed global politics once again as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. This rhetorical restoration, however, rested on increasingly fragile foundations. The social base of American hegemony had not been reconstructed; fiscal and political tolerance for prolonged overseas commitments remained limited; and the structural rivalries reshaping the world economy had only intensified.
Biden implicitly rejected Trump’s move towards burden-shifting and regionalisation, seeking instead to restore alliance cohesion and shared strategic responsibility. Yet the material limits that had prompted Trump’s reprioritisation remained in place.
The chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 exposed this contradiction with unusual clarity. Biden defended the decision to withdraw, one that had in any case been made under Trump. But the spectacle of collapse demonstrated the hollowness of US claims to orderly leadership and long-term planning. This episode highlighted a reality that Trump articulated far more crudely: that the US could no longer indefinitely police regions peripheral to its core strategic interests, regardless of the moral language used to justify doing so.
Nowhere was the gap between aspiration and capacity starker than in Ukraine. For both Russia and China, the return of the Taliban to power in Kabul was read not merely as the end of one long US war but as confirmation that US power was no longer capable of sustaining long-term military commitments at a politically acceptable cost. This necessarily had wider geopolitical consequences.
In Moscow in particular, this perception seems to have encouraged a belief that Russia’s own window for unilateral action was narrowing. Putin’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine can thus be seen in part as an opportunistic and pre-emptive gamble. It was an attempt to reshape Russia’s post-Soviet backyard while US authority appeared weakened, divided and reluctant to commit directly. In this sense, the invasion reflected not Russian confidence but a hubristic Russian cover version of neoconservatism in miniature.
Biden’s administration framed the conflict in expansive civilisational terms, presenting US and NATO support for Kyiv as a defence of democratic Western values. Yet this framing carried strategic costs. By elevating the stakes rhetorically while remaining unwilling to engage directly, the US locked itself into a prolonged proxy war that drained resources, strained alliances and deepened dependence on escalation control rather than resolution. The contrast with the 2025 NSS is instructive: where Biden universalised the Ukraine conflict, Trump’s strategic vision later emphasises containment, America First priorities and a far more explicit hierarchy of nations and states.
At the same time, Biden intensified economic and technological confrontation with China. His administration sought to rebuild supply chains through measures like the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and tried to restrict Chinese access to advanced technologies through sweeping export controls.
These moves were intended both to coordinate allies around a shared competitive strategy and to acknowledge China’s status as the primary systemic rival. But they were pursued within a multilateral framework that assumed levels of cohesion and compliance that were increasingly difficult to secure. The result was an unstable hybrid: economic nationalism pursued through alliances originally intended for a far more globalist world.
Biden’s presidency thus illustrates the limits of liberal restoration. Biden tried to reassert US leadership without resolving the contradictions that had undermined it, relying on inherited institutions and moralistic narratives whose effectiveness had already waned. In the process, he inadvertently strengthened the case for a more openly post-liberal strategy, one that would abandon the pretence of universal leadership in favour of a narrower and more conditional form of international engagement.
The 2025 NSS therefore does not emerge in opposition to Biden so much as from the failure of Biden’s project to arrest the forces that Trumpism had already named.
Reactionary internationalism: Trumpism and Europe’s far right
Trumpism’s significance extends well beyond US territory. From its earliest articulation, it has functioned not just as a domestic strategy for managing imperial decline but as an ideological resource for a broader reorganisation of right-wing politics across the Western world. Nowhere has this been more evident than in its relationship with the resurgence of an authoritarian, nativist and openly racist European far right.
The affinity between Trumpism and Europe’s far-right movements is no more accidental than the admiration that many of the latter have long shown for Vladimir Putin. They all emerge from the same structural conditions: the erosion of national sovereignty under neoliberal globalisation, the weakening of post-1945 social concessions in western Europe and the often-devastating consequences of capitalist restoration in central and eastern Europe.
These have been accompanied by the inability of the established parties of the neoliberal centre to contain the social and demographic consequences of these processes. Where liberal internationalism framed these developments as transitional dislocations to be managed technocratically, Trumpism and its European analogues reframe them as civilisational crises posing the urgent need for political rupture.
Immigration and asylum occupy a central place in this reframing. Both in the US and in Europe, migration is no longer treated primarily as a labour market issue or as a humanitarian concern but as an existential security threat. Borders become not administrative lines between polities with broadly similar political and economic regimes but symbolic frontiers of civilisation itself. Demographic change is recast as cultural replacement.
This logic appears explicitly in Trump’s later strategic documents. But it was already operative in the transatlantic circulation of ideas, funding and political techniques linking Trump-aligned forces to European parties like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and the far-right Alternative for Germany. The MAGA influence in Britain follows a similar pattern, with Trump noticeably influential on Reform UK’s Nigel Farage while the US-based racist billionaire Elon Musk funds Ben Habib’s far-right splinter Advance UK and the fascist demagogue Tommy Robinson.
What is distinctive about this alignment is the way it collapses the distinction between domestic and foreign policy. Immigration policy becomes both a form and a tool of geopolitics, as states coordinate around the defence of borders, identities and “ways of life”. In this sense, Trumpism does not retreat from international politics so much as reconfigure it, projecting domestic priorities outward even as traditional multilateral institutions are denounced or hollowed out.
This explicit and tacit US support for Europe’s far right has profound implications. It helps to undermine the post-1945 settlement that tied western Europe’s stability to liberal bourgeois democracy, managed political pluralism and Euro-Atlanticist military and economic integration. It also accelerates the fragmentation of the EU, encouraging a shift from supranational coordination towards competing nationalisms bound together not by institutions but by civilisational rhetoric with a seemingly common Muslim-flavoured enemy.
For the US ruling class, this strategy offers a means of externalising domestic contradictions. By encouraging allied regimes to adopt harsher border controls, authoritarian policing and cultural exclusion, Trumpism seeks to stabilise a declining imperial core by reshaping its periphery. The costs of this reordering – political repression, racialised violence, the erosion of democratic norms – are borne disproportionately by migrants, minorities and working-class communities on both sides of the Atlantic.
Muslims especially have found themselves at the sharp end of a rhetoric that holds them responsible not just for “terror” or (in the British context) for “grooming gangs” but for “civilisational erasure”. This has turned them into a symbolic enemy for the uninformed and the obsessively enraged in much the same way that Jews were a century or more ago.
Trumpism’s relationship with Europe’s far right thus reveals the former’s deeper logic. It is not just a nationalist retreat but an attempt to construct a post-liberal international order organised around hierarchy, exclusion and managed inequality. In this order, solidarity is replaced by civilisation, rights by belonging and universalism by enforced particularism. The 2025 NSS gives this logic formal expression, but its effects are already visible in the transnational realignment of reactionary forces that Trumpism has helped to legitimise and coordinate.
Canadian premier Mark Carney’s comments at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos indicate that America’s post-1945 allies are starting to see Trump’s America not so much as an ally as a potential future adversary. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s advocacy of a “clear-eyed realism” at the same forum likewise shows that European leaders are getting the message that the US-led “rules-based order” is now rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
The reaction to the Greenland crisis of Britain’s Keir Starmer and the leaders of other European countries that sided with Denmark points in the same direction, as also does Trump’s public ingratitude towards his traditional allies over the US-Israeli bombing of Iran.
Decline management and the reorganisation of imperial power
Trump’s 2025 NSS does not announce this new era so much as formalise it. It names (often crudely and sometimes brutally) the limits that previous administrations sought either to overcome through force or to deny through rhetoric. It marks the transition from an imperialism that claimed universality to one that accepts hierarchy, from a project of global leadership to a strategy of selective engagement and hardened borders.
This shift should not be mistaken for peace, restraint or retreat. Decline management is not demilitarisation, as Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and Greenland have all discovered. It is the reorganisation of coercion with fewer ambitions of transformation, sharper lines of exclusion and greater willingness to externalise costs and to outsource action to militaristic allies like Israel. Where liberal interventionism sought legitimacy through institutions and norms, Trumpism seeks stability through deterrence, economic pressure and pseudo-civilisational “culture wars” to stigmatise and repress dissent.
The world that emerges from this reordering is not less violent but more uneven, defined by zones of abandonment and zones of intensified repression. The criminalisation of protests over Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza gives us a foretaste of this, as does the criminalisation of migrant communities openly planned in the 2025 NSS.
For the working class and the oppressed, the consequences are immediate and material. As imperial power contracts, the space for social compromise narrows. States respond not by redistributing resources downward but by policing borders, identities and dissent more aggressively.
This logic is already visible in the expansion and militarisation of bodies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These increasingly function not as civilian law-enforcement bodies but as internalised border forces, operating with the tactics, weapons and impunity of counterinsurgency units. Raids, summary detentions and lethal force are no longer justified primarily through legal process but through plebiscitary claims that “this is what the American people voted for”, signalling a shift from rule-of-law legitimacy to strongman-style executive licence.
Domestic policing thus becomes an extension of imperial decline management. The techniques once reserved for foreign theatres – collective punishment, deterrent violence, exemplary repression – are employed against working-class communities at home, much as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once predicted would happen in Britain if its ruling class was ever threatened at home. The message is not that “the law will be enforced”, but that reliance on legal protection itself has become dangerous.
This shows how empires in decline become internally violent long before they become externally less powerful. Migration is recast as a security threat rather than a social reality, while cultural difference becomes an existential danger requiring containment. The NSS’s emphasis on civilisation, sovereignty and demographic control thus signals the nation-state’s attempt to reassert order through exclusion and hierarchy where other methods have failed.
The turn to domestic cultural consolidation follows from this shift. If legitimacy can no longer be universalised through institutions and norms, then it must instead be narrowed and hardened. National identity is actively constructed and enforced as a condition of political stability, with inclusion and exclusion becoming central tools of governance.
This dynamic reshapes class struggle as well. Domestic and international politics are no longer separable arenas, if they ever were. Conflicts over jobs, housing, policing and migration are increasingly shaped by geopolitical rivalry, sanctions regimes and militarised borders. The pressures generated by imperial decline are thus displaced onto working-class communities, punishing those deemed to threaten the strategic priorities of the state.
Anti-imperialism under hegemonic decline
Anti-imperialism can therefore no longer be understood simply as opposition to foreign wars waged by a confident hegemon. It must grapple with the politics of decline: with proxy conflicts fought in others’ territories, with authoritarian stabilisation presented as necessity and with reactionary movements that mobilise popular grievances in the service of elite goals.
The left enters this terrain at a disadvantage. Many of the inherited leaders of the “anti-war” left have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since 2003, a high point of the movement that in their minds can be claimed as having been a victory despite its failure to stop the wars and occupations that it mobilised against.
The dominant social pacifist wing of this movement is used to recycling Tony Benn or Jeremy Corbyn-style appeals to universal morality and international law. It is likely to find its traditional mode of argument increasingly irrelevant in a world in which the always hollow pretence of adherence to a rules-based international order is openly abandoned by the dominant power – setting the scene for its rivals to do the same.
As this shift becomes undeniable, sections of the reformist left are likely to move from defending this order to advocating its restoration by force, including through calls for United Nations intervention. A pacifist illusion that was once presented as a flawed but at least workable framework thus runs the risk of becoming a bridge to an ever so “reluctant” bourgeois militarism.
The national isolationist wing of the movement may find itself confused by a US presidency that pursues aggression under the cover of its own “isolationism”. And the vicarious social patriots of the George Galloway and Chris Williamson type – prone to retailing as “anti-imperialism” their own support for the still-rising and hungrier upstart powers – are likely to behave much as they did over Syria and Libya, unable to register when rival powers are acting in concert and spouting reactionary and conspiratorial nonsense even when they are not.
Between them, these three schools of thought have helped to create the perfect alibi for the deficiencies of their own politics, in the form of adversaries on the left for whom the liberal interventionism of the 1990s now looks almost like a golden age of calm and predictability. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provided this fourth school with a convenient bridge from the “anti-war” politics of 2003 (which many but not all of this fourth school once held) to the far more unremarkably pro-war politics of support for “humanitarian intervention”.
The inadequacies of the first three schools do not merely coexist with the liberal-interventionist nostalgia of the fourth but actively generate it, pushing sections of progressive opinion toward pro-war positions as the only seemingly “serious” alternative to moralism, isolationism or conspiratorialism.
A renewed anti-imperialism should not celebrate the “multipolar world” heralded by the rise of Russia and China (so lauded by the Galloways, the Williamsons and the David Millers), not least because increased inter-imperialist rivalry is precisely its defining feature. But nor should it replace the struggle against war with nostalgia for liberal institutions with universalist claims, or with hopes for their benign restoration.
This will involve having to learn a new set of arguments to those learned by rote in 2003 – about “regime change”, “sovereignty” and the objective “evidence” for atrocities – one that contends with concrete realities instead of shoehorning them into inherited schemas.
Legitimate popular struggles abroad – as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Syria, Libya, Iran, Burma, Hong Kong and Xinjiang – should not be demonised or denied solidarity merely because Western leaders try to embarrass their Russian or Chinese rivals over them. But neither should we fail to notice when the struggles of smaller nations have become subsumed into inter-imperialist conflict, as with the cases of Belgium and Serbia in August 1914, or Ukraine in February 2022.
Under today’s conditions of hegemonic decay, resistance must take a different form from what emerged in the era of imperial ascendancy. When empire no longer seeks expansion or consent but stabilisation through contraction, repression and hierarchy, opposition must be rethought accordingly.
This will require confronting not just militarism abroad but authoritarianism at home; not just great-power rivalry but the racialised civilisational narratives that legitimise exclusion and repression. It will require internationalism without liberal-universalist illusions: solidarity rooted in the shared material interests and vulnerabilities of all the oppressed and exploited.
It will mean making clear that workers and youth have no stake in a system that has impoverished them while preparing them to fight one another abroad. Opposition to militarisation will therefore involve arguments about its domestic consequences: its diversion of resources from social needs and its connection to intensified policing, border enforcement and cultural conflict.
Its guiding logic should not be one of futile appeals to a rules-based order that no longer possesses the means to enforce itself. That order, after all, was only ever enforced selectively, destructively and hypocritically even when it possessed that capacity. Rather, our guiding method should be opposition to the class character of the state, under whatever temporary leadership and with whatever current objectives and strategic outlook.
Trump’s NSS is dangerous not because it invents these dynamics but because it gives them coherence and direction. It offers a grimly honest account of what the ruling class of a declining imperialist power is prepared to do to preserve its position.
The task of the left is therefore no longer to restrain an expanding empire but to confront one that has already accepted contraction; a ruling class that is managing its own decline through repression, exclusion and war.