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us imperialism
Trump and the Autumn of the Liberal International Order
Trump's radical “America first” foreign policy seems primed to accelerate the decline of Washington’s international influence and degrade (if not destroy) the world order that the US has sustained since the end of World War II.
Oct 07, 2025
In his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, which is eerily evocative of our current political plight, Gabriel Garcia Marquez described how a Latin American autocrat “discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, [and] became convinced… that the only livable life was one of show.”
In amassing unchecked power spiced with unimaginable cruelty, that fictional dictator extinguished any flicker of opposition in his imaginary Caribbean country, reducing its elite to a craven set of courtiers. Even though he butchered opponents, plundered the treasury, raped the young, and reduced his nation to penury, “lettered politicians and dauntless adulators… proclaimed him the corrector of earthquakes, eclipses, leap years and other errors of God.” When his slavishly loyal defense minister somehow displeased him, the autocrat had him served up, in full-dress uniform laden with military medals, on a silver platter with a pine-nut garnish to a table full of courtiers, forcing them to dutifully consume their slice of the cooked cadaver.
That macabre banquet presaged a recent luncheon President Donald J. Trump hosted at the White House for this nation’s top tech executives, which became a symphony of shameless sycophancy. Billionaire Bill Gates praised the president’s “incredible leadership,” while Apple CEO Tim Cook said it was “incredible to be among… you and the first lady” before thanking him “for helping American companies around the world.” Other executives there celebrated him for having “unleashed American innovation and creativity… making it possible for America to win” again and making this “the most exciting time in America, ever.” As Trump served up the corpse of American democracy, those tech courtiers, like so many of this country’s elites, downed their slice of the cadaver with ill-concealed gusto.
With Congress compliant, the Supreme Court complicit, and media corporations compromised, President Trump’s vision for America and its place in the world has become the nation’s destiny. Since the inauguration for his second term in office in January 2025, he has launched a radical “America first” foreign policy that seems primed to accelerate the decline of Washington’s international influence and, more seriously and much less obviously, degrade (if not destroy) the liberal international order that the US has sustained since the end of World War II. Largely ignored by a media overwhelmed by daily outrages from the Oval Office, that initiative has some truly serious implications for America’s role in the world.
Trump’s Geopolitical Vision
Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements pouring out of the White House, the design of the president’s dubious geopolitical strategy has taken shape with surprising, even stunning speed. Instead of maintaining longstanding security alliances like NATO, Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered autocrat like himself—with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling North and much of South America (and Greenland).
Reflecting what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a “loathing of European freeloading” and Vice President JD Vance’s complaint that Europe has abandoned “our shared democratic values,” President Trump is pursuing this tri-continental strategy at the expense of the traditional transatlantic alliance embodied in NATO that has been the foundation for US foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.
Admittedly, Trump’s reach for complete control over North America does lend a certain geopolitical logic to his otherwise quixotic overtures to claim Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, and make Canada the 51st state. In Trump’s vision of fortress America, the country’s more compact defense perimeter would encompass the entire Arctic, including Greenland, march down the mid-Atlantic with an anchor at the Panama Canal, and encompass the entire Pacific. Not only does such a strategy carry the high cost of alienating once-close allies Canada and Mexico, but every one of its key components comes laden with a potential for serious conflict, particularly the administration’s plans for the Pacific, which run headlong into China’s ongoing maritime expansion.
Demolishing the Liberal International Order
At a broader level, President Trump’s foreign policy represents a forceful repudiation of the three key attributes of the “liberal international order” that has marked US global hegemony since the end of World War II in 1945: alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers, and an ironclad assurance of inviolable sovereignty for all nations, large and small. In a matter of months, Trump has crippled NATO by expressing doubt about its critical mutual-defense clause, imposed an escalating roster of punitive tariffs antithetical to free trade, and threatened to expropriate several sovereign states and territories.
Not only is his ongoing demolition of Washington’s world order inflicting a good deal of pain on much of the globe—from Africans and Asians denied the US Agency for International Development’s lifesaving medicines (and potentially suffering 14 million deaths) to Eastern Europeans threatened by Russia’s relentless advance—but it also undercuts America’s future position on a post-Trumpian planet. His successor could, of course, try to reconcile with Canada and Mexico, placate an insulted Panamanian leadership, and even repair relations with NATO. But the president’s ongoing demolition of Washington’s world system is guaranteed to do lasting, long-term damage to the country’s international standing in ways that have so far eluded even informed observers.
To grasp the full extent of the harm Trump is inflicting on America’s place on this planet, it’s important to understand that Washington’s “liberal international order” is nothing more than the latest iteration of the “world order” that every global hegemon has created as part of its apparatus of power since the 15th century. To understand our own present and future, it’s necessary to explore the nature of those world orders—how they formed, how they functioned, and what their survival and destruction tell us about America’s declining imperial power.
Twain suggested that empire abroad would, sooner or later, bring autocracy at home—an insight Trump confirms with his every tweet, every speech, every executive order.
For the past 500 years, every succeeding global hegemon—Spain, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—has not only amassed wealth and military strength but also used that extraordinary power to propagate a world order that often transcended its narrow national interests. And once the inevitable imperial decline set in, a fading global hegemon often found that its world order could serve as a diplomatic safety net, extending its international influence for years, even decades beyond its moment of imperial glory.
While even the most powerful of history’s empires eventually fall, such world orders entwine themselves in the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. They influence the languages people speak, the laws that order their lives, and the ways that so many millions of us work, worship, and even play. World orders might be much less visible than the grandeur of great empires, but they have always proven both more pervasive and more persistent.
By structuring relations among nations and influencing the cultures of the peoples who live in them, world orders can outlast even the powerful empires that created them. Indeed, some 90 empires, major and minor, have come and gone since the start of the age of exploration in the 15th century. In those same 500 years, however, there have been just four major world orders—the Iberian age after 1494; the British imperial era that began in 1815; the Soviet system that lasted from 1945 to 1991; and Washington’s liberal international order, launched in 1945, that might, based on present developments, reach its own end somewhere around 2030.
Successful global empires driven by the hard power of guns and money have also required the soft power of cultural and ideological suasion embodied in a world order. Spain’s bloody conquest of Latin America soon segued into three centuries of colonial rule, softened by Catholic conversion, the spread of the Spanish language as a lingua franca, and that continent’s integration into a growing global economy. Once permanent mints were established in Mexico City, Lima, and Potosí during the 17th century, Spanish galleons would carry millions of minted silver coins—worth eight reales and thus known as “pieces of eight”—across the globe for nearly three centuries, creating the world’s first common currency and making those silver coins the medium of exchange for everyone from African traders to Virginia planters.
During its century of global hegemony from 1820 to 1920, though it seldom hesitated to use military power when needed, Great Britain would also prove the exemplar par excellence of soft power, espousing an enticing political culture of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language, an enticing literature, authoritative mass media like the global Reuters news service and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and its virtual creation of modern athletics (including cricket, football or soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). On a higher plane of principle, Britain’s protracted anti-slavery campaign throughout much of the 19th century invested its global hegemony with a certain moral authority.
Similarly, the raw power of US military and economic dominance after 1945 was softened by the appeal of Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball. Just as Britain battled the slave trade for nearly a century, so Washington’s advocacy of human rights lent legitimacy to its world order. While Spain espoused Catholicism, and Britain an Anglophone ethos of rights, the United States, at the dawn of its global dominion, courted allies through soft-power programs that promoted democracy, the international rule of law, and economic development.
Such world orders are not the mere imaginings of historians trying, decades or centuries later, to impose their own logic on a chaotic past. In each era, the dominant power of the day worked to reorder its world for generations to come through formal agreements—with the Treaty of Tordesillas dividing much of the globe between Spain and Portugal in 1494; the 1815 Congress of Vienna (convened to resolve the Napoleonic wars) launching a full century of British global dominion; the San Francisco Conference in 1945 drafting the United Nations charter and so beginning Washington’s liberal international order; and the Moscow meeting in 1957 assembling 64 communist parties at the Kremlin for a shared commitment to socialist struggle and putting the Soviet Union atop its own global order.
Just as the British imperial system was far more pervasive than its Iberian predecessor, so Washington’s world order went beyond both of them and the Soviet Russian system, too, to become deeply embedded on an essentially global scale. While the 1815 Congress of Vienna was an ephemeral gathering of two dozen diplomats whose influence faded within a decade or two, the San Francisco conference of 1945 formed the United Nations, which now has 193 member states with broad international responsibilities. By the start of the 21st century, moreover, there were nearly 40,000 “UN-recognized international nongovernmental organizations” like the Catholic Relief Services, operating “in the remotest corners of the globe.”
But the similarities were perhaps more important. Note as well that both victorious powers, Great Britain and the United States, used those peace conferences to launch world orders that militated successfully against major wars among the great powers, with the pax Britannica lasting nearly a century (1815-1914) and the pax Americana persisting for 80 years and still counting.
Empires Fade but World Orders Persist
If world orders are so pervasive and persistent, why don’t they last forever? Each transition from one to the next has occurred when a massively destructive cataclysm has coincided with major social or political change. The rise of the Iberian age of exploration was preceded by a century of epidemics, known as the Black Death, which killed 60% of the populations of Europe and China, devastating their respective worlds. Similarly, the British imperial era emerged when the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe coincided with the dynamism of the industrial revolution launched in England, unleashing the power of coal-fired steam energy and formal colonial rule to change the face of the globe.
After the unprecedented devastation of World War II, Washington’s leadership in rebuilding and reordering a damaged planet established the current liberal international order. By the middle decades of our present century, if not before, global warming caused by fossil-fuel emissions will likely equal or surpass those earlier catastrophes on a universal scale of “disaster magnitude,” with the potential to precipitate the eclipse of Washington’s world order. Compounding the damage, President Trump’s sustained, systematic attack on America’s “liberal international order”—its alliances, free trade, and institutions like the UN—is only serving to accelerate the decline of a system that has served the world and this country reasonably well since 1945.
After the Fall
Even if the empire that created it suffers a complete collapse, a deeply rooted world order can usually survive that fall, while serving as a kind of diplomatic safety net for a fading power. The Iberian empires had lost their preeminence by the 17th century, but even today Latin America is deeply Catholic and Spanish remains the main language for much of the continent.
Understanding its limits as a small island nation with a vast global empire, Great Britain conducted a relatively careful imperial retreat that enfolded former colonies into the British Commonwealth, preserved the City of London’s financial clout, retained international influence as Washington’s strategic partner, and maintained its global cultural authority through civil institutions (the Anglican Communion, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and leading universities). Today, a full 50 years after the end of its empire, Great Britain still plays a role in world affairs far beyond its small size as a nation of just 70 million people living in a country no bigger than the state of Oregon.
Even though it’s been 35 years since the Soviet empire collapsed with spectacular speed, testifying eloquently to the crude coercion and economic exploitation that lay at its heart, Moscow still maintains considerable diplomatic influence across much of the old Soviet sphere in Eurasia.
Without Donald Trump’s systemic subversion of the liberal international order and its chief creation, the United Nations, the United States might have retained sufficient international influence to lead the world toward a shared governance of a global commons on a planet whose environment is sorely threatened—its seas depleted, water evaporating, storms raging, heatwaves soaring, and its Arctic wildly warming. Instead, the United States has fully ceded leadership of the campaign against climate change to China, while not only denying its reality but blocking the development of alternative energy projects critical not only for the planet but for America’s global competitiveness. While China is already leading the world in efficient electric vehicles and low-cost solar and wind power, Trump’s America remains firmly wedded to an economy based on high-cost carbon energy that will, in the fullness of time, render its output grossly overpriced, its industries uncompetitive, and the planet a disaster zone.
Back in 2011, six years before Trump first entered the Oval Office, political scientist G. John Ikenberry argued that, while the US ability to shape world politics would decline as its raw power retreated, its “liberal international order will survive and thrive,” including its emphasis on multilateral governance, open markets, free global trade, human rights, and respect for sovereignty. With Trump having essentially demolished the US Agency for International Development’s global humanitarian work and sent a “wrecking ball” toward the United Nations, while condemning it in a recent speech to its General Assembly—“I ended seven wars… and never even received a phone call from the United Nations”—it would be difficult to make such a sanguine argument today.
Instead, Mark Twain’s classic futuristic assessment of American world power seems more appropriate. “It was impossible to save the Great Republic. It was rotten to the heart. Lust for conquest had long ago done its work,” he wrote in an imagined history of this country from a far-off future. “Trampling upon the helpless abroad,” he added, “had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” After watching the US occupation of the Philippines in 1898 descend into a bloodstained pacification program replete with torture and atrocities, Twain suggested that empire abroad would, sooner or later, bring autocracy at home—an insight Trump confirms with his every tweet, every speech, every executive order.
Whether the United States will emulate Britain in a managed global retreat with minimal domestic damage or fulfill Mark Twain’s dismal vision by continuing to attack its own world order, diminishing if not destroying its legacy, is something for future historians to decide. For now, listening to Trump’s recent rant at the UN complaining about a stalled escalator and condemning climate-change science as a “green scam” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated,” ordinary Americans should have received a clear sign that their president’s autocratic aspirations are subverting their country’s claims to world leadership, both now and in the future.
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Wife of Man Aboard Venezuelan Ship Bombed by Trump Says Husband Was a Fisher
The Trump administration has offered no concrete evidence to support its claim that the boats destroyed by the US military were carrying drugs.
Sep 29, 2025
A woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the at least 17 people extrajudicially murdered by US military strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela said her slain husband was a fisher, contradicting the Trump administration's claim that the vessels were trafficking cocaine and other drugs.
The New York Times reported Sunday that the unnamed woman said her husband left one day and never returned to her and their four children. The US has attacked at least two Venezuelan boats this month, prompting allegations of criminality.
The Trump administration has offered no hard evidence—such as drugs or weapons recovered from the targeted boats—to support its assertion that the vessels were smuggling narcotics. While the area where the boats were bombed is a notorious drug-running route, it is also frequented by migrants, human traffickers, and people selling subsidized Venezuelan gasoline in nearby Trinidad and Tobago.
Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff who reportedly once pushed for drone strikes on unarmed migrants, played a key role in directing the strikes on the boats, according to reporting by The Guardian.
The attacks on the boats came amid the US deployment of numerous US warships and thousands of sailors and Marines off the coast of Venezuela, a country Trump has repeatedly threatened with regime change in the face of defiant anti-imperialist resistance from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The US has a more than century-long history of meddling in the affairs of Venezuela, one of the world's leading oil producers.
Sources told NBC News last week that Pentagon officials are weighing options for attacks on drug traffickers inside Venezuela, with strikes possible within the next few weeks.
"More mass murder on the cards?” the news outlet Venezuelanalysis wrote in response. "Lots of speculation and anonymous sources, but it shows that no war crimes are off limits.”Keep ReadingShow Less
'She Died Free': Tributes Pour In for Revolutionary Icon Assata Shakur
"They wanted her bound, broken, and paraded as an example, but instead, she slipped their grip and lived out her life in exile, surrounded by people who honored her struggle and her survival," said one admirer.
Sep 27, 2025
Assata Shakur, a Black revolutionary who inspired generations of activists to struggle for a better world, passed away on Thursday in Havana, Cuba, where she had lived in exile from the US for over four decades.
Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced her death on Friday, saying it was caused by a combination of “health conditions and advanced age." She was reportedly 78 years old.
"At approximately 1:15 pm on September 25, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath," her daughter Kakuya Shakur wrote on Facebook on Friday. "Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I am feeling at this time. I want to thank you for your loving prayers that continue to anchor me in the strength that I need in this moment. My spirit is overflowing in unison with all of you who are grieving with me at this time."
Shakur, who was born Joanne Deborah Byron and was also known as Joanne Deborah Chesimard, spent the first three years of her life in Queens, New York before moving to Wilmington, North Carolina. She then returned to Queens for third grade.
"Assata’s unwavering commitment to the liberation of her people continues to inspire generations."
"I spent my early childhood in the racist segregated South," she recalled in a 1998 letter to Pope John Paul II. "I later moved to the northern part of the country, where I realized that Black people were equally victimized by racism and oppression."
Shakur became active in the anti-Vietnam War, student, and Black liberation movements while attending Borough of Manhattan Community College and the City College of New York. After graduation, she joined first the Black Panther Party and then the Black Liberation Army (BLA).
"I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the US government has done everything in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one," she wrote in 2013.
In 1973, she and two other BLA activists were stopped at the New Jersey Turnpike by two state troopers. By the end of the encounter, both Shakur's friend Zayd Malik Shakur and trooper Werner Foerster were shot dead. In 1977, Shakur was convicted of Foerster's murder in a trial she described as a "legal lynching." Throughout her life, she maintained her innocence.
"I was shot once with my arms held up in the air and then once again from the back," she wrote of the shootout.
She was sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years, but didn't long remain behind bars.
"In 1979, fearing that I would be murdered in prison, and knowing that I would never receive any justice, I was liberated from prison, aided by committed comrades who understood the depths of the injustices in my case and who were also extremely fearful for my life," she wrote.
In 1984, she claimed asylum in Cuba. Throughout her life, she also remained staunchly committed to the cause of liberation for all oppressed peoples.
"I have advocated and I still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the United States," she wrote to John Paul II. "I advocate self-determination for my people and for all oppressed inside the United States. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty."
During her exile, her writings, including her 1987 autobiography, gained a wide audience and brought her story and voice to younger activists.
"It is our duty to fight for our freedom," she wrote in one of the book's most famous passages. "It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
She was also influential in the world of music and hip-hop, serving as godmother to Tupac Shakur and inspiring songs by Public Enemy and Common, among others.
The US government did not give up its pursuit of her. In 2013, under President Barack Obama, the Federal Bureau of Investigation named her the first woman on its "Most Wanted Terrorist" list. The FBI and the state of New Jersey also doubled the reward for information leading to her capture. That reward will now never be claimed.
"She died free!" one of her admirers, who uses the handle The Cake Lady, wrote on social media on Friday. "The US government, after decades of pursuit, never got the satisfaction of putting her in a cage. They wanted her bound, broken, and paraded as an example, but instead, she slipped their grip and lived out her life in exile, surrounded by people who honored her struggle and her survival."
News of her passing inspired tributes from social justice and anti-imperialist leaders and organizations, including former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)
"We honor the life of comrade Assata Shakur, a revolutionary who inspires and pushes all of us in the struggle for a better world," wrote anti-war group CodePink on social media.
Community organizer Tanisha Long posted: "Assata Shakur joins the ancestors a free woman. She did not die bound by the carceral system and she did not pass away living in a land that never respected or accepted her. Assata taught us that liberation can not be bargained for, it must be taken."
The Revolutionary Blackout Network wrote, "Thank you for fighting to liberate us all, comrade."
The New York-based People's Forum said: "We honor Assata’s life and legacy as a tireless champion of the people and as a symbol of hope and resistance for millions around the world in urgent fight against racism, police brutality, US imperialism, and white supremacy. Assata’s unwavering commitment to the liberation of her people continues to inspire generations."
The Democratic Socialists of America vowed to "honor her legacy by recognizing our duty to fight for our freedom, to win, to love, and protect one another because we have nothing to lose but our chains."
Black Lives Matter organizer Malkia Amala Cyril lamented to The Associated Press that Shakur died during a global rise of authoritarianism.
“The world in this era needs the kind of courage and radical love she practiced if we are going to survive it,” Cyril said.
Several tributes featured Shakur's own words.
"I believe in living," she wrote in a poem at the beginning of her autobiography.
"I believe in birth. I believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And i believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port."
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