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NLR 157

Cover of NLR 157, January–February 2026 showing cover titles: Susan Watkins, New World Order?; Ervand Abrahamian, Iran in the Crosshairs; Rohana Kuddus, Indonesia's Trump; Xi Ruochen, Hong Kong for Readers; Nausicaa Renner, Remaking the GOP; Tony Wood, Boom Times; Emilie Bickerton, Subterranean Godard; Costas Lapavitsas, Structures of the New Dollar Imperialism

editorial

Susan WatkinsTrump Abroad

In which direction is America heading, amid the strategic cacophony of Trump’s second term—counter-revolution in the Caribbean, onslaught on Iran, somersaults on China? Analysis of the political logics at stake as the US ratchets up from covert to overt assassinations; from wars of attrition to wars of overthrow.

articles

Ervand AbrahamianIran Under Fire

One of modern Iran’s leading historians provides a critical anatomy of the power structures of the Islamic Republic, on the eve of war—and a scathing denunciation of the long-incubated American-Israeli assault on the country, calculated to bring about Syria-style disintegration and civil war.

Xi RuochenIn Search of Good Books

Where might Chinese-language readers hungry for critical histories and marginalized voices find such books? A history of Sinosphere publishing, charting the relationship between Hong Kong and the Mainland within a broader media ecology from the Revolution to the present.

Rohana KuddusPrabowo’s Year One

A critical-analytical portrait of Southeast Asia’s answer to Trump, as the Indonesian President—formerly the Suharto dictatorship’s crown prince and chief butcher in East Timor—re-centralizes power in the archipelago, strengthening the Army’s place within the civil administration.

Costas LapavitsasA Topography of the New Dollar Imperialism

Topography of the contemporary world economy as a system of subordination, structured by the primacy of Fed-backed dollar-liquidity and a world division of labour jointly configured by productive and financial capital, generating forms of peripheral financialization. Monetary dominance—ultimately underwritten by military force?

reviews

A Bolivarian Republic of Letters?

Tony Wood on Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Las cartas del Boom. Correspondence between four titans of the midcentury Latin American novel.

Party and Class

Nausicaa Renner on Paul Heideman, Rogue Elephant. Hollowed-out parties and capitalist sectoralization said to underlie the Trumpian capture of the GOP.

Subterranean Godard

Emilie Bickerton on Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects. A ‘negative’ history that sheds new light on the master filmmaker.