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We are living at a moment of heightened imperial rivalries. As I write these words, the United States and Israel have unleashed horrific bombing raids on Iran. This military aggression follows on the heels of the January kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro by the United States.
In such circumstances the foremost duty of every socialist is to oppose all acts of imperial violence. Nothing is more urgent than the building of mass anti-war movements.
At the same time, a serious international left has a duty to analyze the dynamics underlying imperialism today. This is essential for the popular education required to develop sustained movements. All too often explanations are superficial in nature. Claims to the effect that this is simply an oil grab or that Trump is an egomaniac fail to probe the deep reconfigurations of imperial rivalry in our times. Ignored too often in left analyses is the reality that a new center of global accumulation—and one with a global reach—has developed over the neoliberal period. The emergence of China as an epicenter of the world economy has reshaped the political geography of empire. This is why US imperial strategy today revolves around its efforts to contain China’s rise to global influence.
David McNally teaches history at the University of Houston and is an editor of Spectre Journal. His latest book is Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (University of California Press, 2025)
A new power on the block
Over the last forty years, China has become the world’s most dynamic region of capital accumulation. As of 2024, the country contained 27 percent of world manufacturing. This compares to 17 percent for the US, five percent for Germany, and a mere three percent for India. Since 2001, China has been the world’s largest producer of steel, has built new cities at a dizzying pace, and is now a major AI innovator.
This phenomenal growth induced the so-called commodity super-cycle of recent decades as China’s boom pushed up demand (and prices) for oil, gas, minerals and other natural resources. From Latin America to Africa and the Middle East, China built supply chains and invested in resource industries to secure its access to vital raw materials. Central here is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through which Beijing has invested $1.4 trillion in large projects especially in energy and mining. In the course of developing thousands of deals involving 150 countries, China has also become the world’s largest bilateral creditor. Critically, the Chinese state has developed dominance over the production of rare earths, which are vital to defense and semiconductor industries, alongside enormous control over key minerals such as cobalt and nickel. In fact, according to a survey by the International Energy Agency, China is now the dominant supplier of 19 of 20 of the world’s most critical minerals.
“The unraveling of historic US alliances reflects the rage of a President and his cabinet as they confront limitations on their economic and political dominance.”
The geopolitical implications of all this exploded into the public eye last April. Trump had just hit China with tariffs of 125 percent. In retaliation, the Chinese government imposed tight restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals. So devastating was this for US auto manufacturers, that a stunned White House relented, dramatically reducing the tariffs imposed on China. This reversal, however, only induced the White House to double down on its efforts to maximize control over strategic raw materials from oil to copper and on its threats to seize or control territories from Greenland to Venezuela. Here we find elements of an imperial strategy which fits the perverse rationality of late capitalist rivalry.
While containing China was a huge preoccupation of the Biden administration, this has only intensified under Trump. This is signaled in the 2025 US National Security Strategy report, which sets out “securing access to critical supply chains and materials” as an urgent priority. Beyond this, the US government has been frantically signing mineral-based deals with twenty or more states and expanding its strategic stockpile of rare earths. In February of this year, the US State Department also hosted a “Mineral Ministerial” attended by 54 countries, excluding China, which was not invited. At the same time, US Vice-President J. D. Vance announced a new trading bloc focused on critical minerals. As I write these lines, Trump has also proclaimed a new military alliance, called Shield of the Americas, with a number of Latin American nations—although significantly without Brazil, Mexico, or Colombia.
Not to be left out of the resource battles, the European Union has also entered the fray. The EU has agreed to a new free-trade zone with four key South American countries—Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay—all rich in strategic resources, and it is negotiating with Brazil for joint investment projects in critical raw materials. But the decisive line of conflict for the moment is between the US and China. And recent acts of US military aggression should be seen in this context.
Beyond Iran and Venezuela
Recognizing that it trails China in building global supply chains and direct investments that secure access to crucial resources, the US state has leaned into its one great strength: military superiority. This is a risky approach even in terms of their own interests, as we shall see. But it is clearly the Trumpian strategy of the moment.
It is no accident that Trump has recently targeted two oil-exporting nations with close links to China: Venezuela and Iran.
Contrary to some commentary, it is not at all the case that the US is reliant on Venezuelan or Middle East oil. But China is. Not only is Venezuela the fourth-largest recipient of loans from China which, as of 2023, topped $100 billion; but these loans were secured by (and meant to be paid off with) Venezuela’s crude oil—the very oil that Trump now claims for the US. When the White House declares that henceforth “the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region,” it is in large measure trying to roll back China’s economic and political presence throughout the region. They are endeavoring to curtail Beijing’s access to the region’s oil and minerals. To be sure, the White House is certainly interested in monopolizing access to the abundant supplies of gold, bauxite, cobalt, and rare earths in Venezuela. But the US does not materially need Venezuelan crude oil. Its key geopolitical aspiration, however, is to remove that oil—along with many other raw commodities—from China’s reach. In so doing, Washington aims to increase its leverage over China in order to restrain its rise to global dominance.
As Adam Hanieh has powerfully shown, this is what drives US imperial strategy in the Middle East. Here too, the US is not reliant on oil from the region. But, again, China is. Approximately 44 percent of all China’s oil imports come from the region. Nearly 1.4 million barrels per day arrive from Iran. By dominating the Middle East—and in undermining Iran—Washington serves notice to a feared rival that its energy supply can be sharply curtailed at the whim of the White House.
Land Grabs, Crypto, and Power Without Elite Hegemony
As much as the US under Trump has demonstrated immense military capabilities, it has not managed to block China’s rise as a major power. More significant perhaps, in flexing its military might and issuing threats against friendly states from Canada to Denmark, the US is squandering its capacity to hegemonize a coherent and unified imperial bloc consisting of North America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and associated allies. Instead, it is squandering hegemonic capital as Trump and his entourage rage against friends and bully historic allies. When Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney told the World Economic Forum in January that “the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must,” this was no great revelation. Carney simply declared publicly what officials and policy makers have been saying privately since Trump’s 2024 reelection.
“While China builds global industries and supply chains, the Trumpian model of capitalism pivots on real estate swindles, legal intimidation, and blustering exaggeration of financial assets. It revolves around military invasions, tariff wars, and manic deal-making.”
Yet this reveals a weakness, not a strength, of US empire today. The unraveling of historic US alliances reflects the rage of a President and his cabinet as they confront limitations on their economic and political dominance due to China’s ascent. Trump, of course, is ideally suited to a project of furious bullying. He appears to revel in anal sadism. And as someone whose fortune was made in real estate, he is obsessed with appropriating territory. Trump’s rumblings about seizing Gaza and turning it into a luxury tourist haven, a “Middle East Riviera,” further express his colonialist real estate mentality. In fact, Trump combines a crudely “materialist” notion of capital with an utterly “idealist” one. Not only does he fetishize land and the resources beneath it; he also imagines capitalist profit on the model of the exaction of rents. And across the history of capitalism the latter involves packaging land titles as fictitious capitals—commodities based on projections of future values—subject to deal-making and speculative manias.
Thus, while threats to seize Greenland and to make Canada a US state fit with a territorial fetish redolent of an older imperialism, a mania for crypto currencies expresses the manic compulsions of the financial speculator. Not only has the president launched the $Trump meme coin; he has also pledged to make the US “the crypto capital of the world." While China builds global industries and supply chains, the Trumpian model of capitalism pivots on real estate swindles, legal intimidation, and blustering exaggeration of financial assets. It revolves around military invasions, tariff wars, and manic deal-making. To be sure, the US state oversees real investment projects. But the Trumpian imaginary works in terms of a zero-sum accumulation model designed to monopolize access to resources without any real perspective for long-term development. The Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, meme coins, and a compliant regime in Venezuela may induce MAGA chest-thumping. But it is difficult to discern here a viable long-term accumulation strategy. And it is extraordinarily hard to imagine how military invasions, land grabs, and tariff wars can produce a renewed imperial bloc united against China’s rise.
So, we are left with an unstable and fractured world order lurching from resource wars to military conflicts. Trumpism merely expresses this general social decline. Rosa Luxemburg’s insistence that the world faces a choice between socialism or barbarism once more defines the fundamental dilemma of our age.
This article first appeared in LuXemburg
