It would be laughable if it were not so tragic. For at least four reasons.

1. The full-throated defence of globalization by a left that previously characterized it as the source of every human misfortune. Having deplored the indiscriminate opening of markets for thirty years, it is now tearing its hair out because that opening is being rescinded, as the American empire proceeds with deglobalization (a process that has been underway for the past decade). It might be recalled that for years left-wing economists regarded the trade protectionism of the Cambridge School as a guiding light.

2. The carefree jubilation with which Europe met German rearmament, heedless of the country’s last two military build-ups and their disastrous consequences for the world. Blithe cheerfulness also met news that Chancellor Friedrich Merz was deploying the 45th Armoured Division in Lithuania – Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, which tells the story of how the Teutonic Knights were (fortunately) driven back from this very region, had seemingly been forgotten.

3. Europe’s anguish as it realizes that it has somehow (no one quite knows where or how) lost its umbrella. A feigned anguish, considering that in all of Donald Trump’s outbursts, this subject has been conspicuous by its absence: not once has the US president threatened to scale back American bases in Europe, nor has he raised the possibility of removing its hundred-odd nuclear bombs, nor the approximately one hundred thousand troops it has kept stationed on the continent for more than half a century. No matter: European leaders wring their hands, regardless of the persistent silence. My God, they cry, we have no umbrella to protect us from the storms on the horizon. At the very least, we are in urgent need of a raincoat.

4. Speaking of raincoats, witness the chest-thumping virility with which France and Great Britain flex their modest nuclear muscles, striking a pose of proud independence from a United States now weary of the Old Continent, and urging other European countries to spend more on weapons. This is, of course, precisely what Trump had ordered of his vassals: raise military spending to at least 3% of GDP, and then 5%. The only way to achieve this is by slashing social expenditure – schools, healthcare and so on. In other words, in the name of bellicose continental independence, the European ‘powers’ are rushing to force their citizens to swallow the diktat of Washington.

Today, the tragicomic seems the only register in which to narrate contemporary events, such is the gulf between proclamation and action. To narrate, not understand, much less predict: unpredictability appears the sole constant of the period, the only forecast that can be made with any certainty.

***

Interpretations of Trumpism – distinct, of course, from Trump himself – tend to oscillate between two pairs of opposites: minimalist/maximalist and declinist/anti-declinist. In a recent Sidecar article, Matthew Karp describes the poles of the first with great clarity:

Maximalists are inclined to view Trump as an agent or conduit of a sudden historical rupture, whether the transformation of the party system, the destruction of American democracy or the implosion of the liberal world order. Minimalists see Trump not as a fundamental break but rather as a lurid symbol of longer-running developments, or a symptom of crises that lie elsewhere – a black hole detracting attention from real political problems.

For Karp, this dichotomy cuts across both left and right:

Despite some disagreement, liberal and conservative maximalists unite in seeing the President himself as the chief and often the only issue in national politics; both have also leapt to enlist in the “fascism wars”, often brandishing the F-word as a cudgel to discipline the left at elections, and elsewhere.

Minimalism, on the other hand, is the stance adopted by both Republican and Democratic leaderships, which are united in the strategy of ‘ha da passare la nottata’, that is, of waiting for the Trumpian storm to blow over. The former are using it to notch up a few of the right’s traditional goals – tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization of state services, a shower of public contracts. The Democrats, for their part, highlight inconsistencies, reversals and blunders, wielding them as weapons for a (hoped-for) electoral comeback in next year’s midterms. But both sides are united in supine, bipartisan acquiescence: Republicans swallowing without protest the coup Trump carried out within the Grand Old Party, Democrats enduring the institutional offensive – total disempowerment of the legislative branch – without even engaging in a little parliamentary obstruction in the form of filibustering.

Among the staunchest minimalists are not only the leaders of both parties, but also the major players on Wall Street. Brokers have reportedly nicknamed the president ‘Taco’ – the Mexican tortilla – short for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’. The epithet refers to Trump’s knack for beating a hasty retreat at the first obstacle or the merest whiff of hostility from a real centre of power. For ultimately, after the sound and fury of the first six months, the three headline policies meant to define Trumpism – drastic streamlining of the state apparatus, immigration and tariffs – have all essentially stalled.

The ignominious exit of multi-billionaire Elon Musk, his foul-mouthed clash with the president, and the resistance from other departments together signalled the effective collapse of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). What remains is a punitive, vindictive settling of scores against those parts of the state that have pursued policies at odds with Trumpism, or that are too deeply entrenched to be rapidly reconfigured – the State Department, for example.

As expected, the mass expulsion of 13 million indocumentados has proved to be pure rhetoric. If implemented, no American would ever eat a lettuce leaf, a tomato or a chicken again, given the heavy reliance on immigrant labour in the agrifood sector. Undocumented workers are employed by major capitalist groups that supported Trump during his re-election campaign, the same groups that subsequently advised (or instructed?) him to limit deportation to raids and shows of force, as with the deployment of the Marines in Los Angeles – a prefiguration of a military regime to come, complete with the chaining and public humiliation of a few thousand deportees. Utterly insignificant to the labour market, this was aimed at further harassing foreign workers and degrading them on a symbolic level, while leaving the core of the industrial reserve army intact. It should not be forgotten that Barack Obama earned the nickname ‘Deporter-in-Chief’. In the words of The Washington Post: the Trump ‘administration has deported 14,700 people per month on average, according to NBC News. That’s far below Obama’s peak in 2013, when he deported 36,000 per month. And it’s not even close to the Trump administration’s reported goal of deporting 1 million people in a year.’

On tariffs, the zigzag has been even more spectacular. Remember the broadsides at the end of January against Canada and Mexico, formerly US partners in the NAFTA free-trade area? Now, the ‘threatened’ tariffs are lower than those imposed on other countries. Trump’s tariffs went from being levelled against the entire world on ‘Liberation Day’ (2 April) to postponement after the most powerful man on Wall Street, Jamie Dimon – CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the world for the past nineteen years – suggested that perhaps things were going a bit far. This despite Dimon having supported Trump and angled to become his Treasury Secretary. The ultimatum was then delayed from July to August. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether we will see yet another postponement or a new schedule altogether.

Trump has no qualms about performing the most brazen about-faces, as he is amply demonstrating across all number of fields. Throughout his life, from his turbulent career as a real estate developer to his time as a reality show host, it has been evident that he is no lionheart – rather he is strong with the weak, and weak with the strong. This cowardice may well be the very quality that has kept him afloat despite so many bankruptcies. But interpreting politics in terms of a leader’s psychological traits (‘Hitler was crazy’) is conceptually misguided and, more importantly, explains little.  

All the more so because, if we must speak of chickens, they are multiplying in the United States, not only among Trump’s supporters but also among those who coined the ‘Taco’ epithet, namely high finance and big capital. The prevailing narrative in the mainstream press – the New York Times and Washington Post, along with all their European imitators (Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, The Economist, Corriere della Sera) – is that Trumpism is an aberration, the preserve of ignorant, overweight, rural hot-heads, and has nothing to do with classical liberal capitalism (which is refined, cultivated, urbane and in peak physical shape). It’s a narrative that renders Silicon Valley more inexplicable than the Orphic mysteries.

This narrative runs up against two realities. The first is that in every country in the world, high finance and big capital have for as long as they have existed been government-oriented by nature, always seeking good relations with the administration of the day – at least so long as it does not harm their interests – and naturally doing everything possible to bend state policy in their favour. Second, if Trumpism – again, not to be confused with Trump himself – were merely an aberration, we should be seeing the forces of classical liberalism rally to defend their cause. Yet no such effort is discernible, not even from the financiers who supported Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential contest, showering her with more money than her adversary received.

We should be witnessing a clash between two fractions of capital with divergent interests. Yet here, too, there is not the faintest sign of protest. Witness the lightning speed with which every industrial and financial actor – starting with the giant investment funds, BlackRock, Vanguard and the rest – has dropped any hint of environmental policy, abandoned whatever timid ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) or DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives they had adopted under the previous administration. It is true that, for the first time in many decades, no senior figure from Goldman Sachs – the world’s most powerful investment bank, so omnipresent in administrations past it earned the nickname ‘Government Sachs’ – was appointed to a senior position in the President’s team. But Goldman itself has put a brave face on things and adapted.

The suspicion therefore arises that the Trumpist aberration is not in fact so aberrant – that it rather expresses a systemic, or at least governmental, tendency. This view is reinforced by the outcry in the mainstream press over Project 2025 and the think tank that developed it, the Heritage Foundation, and the fact that Trump is implementing its main dictates. The scandalized are either feigning ignorance, or simply unaware, of the history of the Heritage Foundation’s relationship with successive Republican administrations. Project 2025 is not the first, but the ninth such dossier, of a series titled ‘Mandate for Leadership’. The first appeared in 1981 to guide the newly elected President Ronald Reagan; in 1984, for Reagan’s second term, ‘Mandate for Leadership II’ was published, in which it was claimed that 60-65% of the Foundation’s proposals had been implemented. In November 2016, shortly after Trump’s election, ‘Mandate for Leadership VII’ was published. In 2018, Heritage stated that the Trump administration had so far implemented 64% of its 334 policy proposals.

From this standpoint, Trumpism not only isn’t identifiable with Trump himself, nor limited to his histrionic showmanship, but should be understood in terms of the long wave of Reaganism. It draws on an arsenal of ideas, a wealth of studies and research that far transcend his own ad hoc initiatives (after all, Trump did not dash off 140 executive orders himself in a single night). But it should also be understood in terms of the long-running debate over how to manage, reinforce or in any case avoid weakening what can, in every respect, be called the American empire.

***

We should clear up the misconception, widespread among European opinion, that divides US political forces into more imperialist and less imperialist. No ruling class in possession of power is ever willing to cede it or see it diminish, let alone disappear. The debate between rival factions of the American elite always concerns how to manage the empire – the strategy to strengthen it and the tactics to expand it. And as a rule, each faction will accuse the other of pursuing policies that weaken it and hasten the empire’s demise.

As I have written before, people have been talking about ‘American decline’ since before I was born – a refrain that greets every war and crisis, so frequently that a witty New Yorker commentator once remarked that today’s declinists must begin by explaining why yesterday’s declinists were wrong. Over the past seventy years, a distinctive feature of the American empire has been that it has lost every war it has fought yet emerged from each defeat stronger than before. European declinists are essentially indulging in wishful thinking, a hope that the empire will falter, and they anxiously watch for the smallest sign of decay (and when they find one, they magnify it with transparent schadenfreude: it is not only Europe in decline, now it is America’s turn…). By contrast, as historian Victoria De Grazia told me, ‘American declinism is always conditional. Anyone who supports the decline thesis will also say, “if you don’t want to decline, you must do this”. Chomsky: stop being imperialist. Huntington: stop being a rationalist-technicist. Barber: stop being a moderate Democrat. Kennedy: stop spending on arms, instead focus on reviving your industrial base to become more competitive. Nye: deploy your soft power more strategically, alongside military and economic hard power.’

This form of rhetoric – ‘if you don’t do as I say, our empire will decline and fall’ – is in full bloom today. Here the maximalist/minimalist divide intersects with the declinist/anti-declinist polarity, since every maximalist reading of Trumpism is, by definition, declinist. And since the loudest maximalist voice when it comes to the Trump presidency is Trump himself, it is hardly surprising that, on Inauguration Day he declared that ‘American decline is over’. That is, he presented himself – and continues to see himself – as the sole remedy for and bulwark against the erosion of US power, which has been brought about, so he claims, by the Democrats, woke culture and racial discrimination against poor whites.

But then declinism turned against him. A few headlines will suffice: ‘We Are Witnessing the Suicide of a Superpower’ (Max Boot, Washington Post, 8 June 2025); ‘The End of the Long American Century: Trump and the Sources of US Power’ (Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Foreign Affairs, July–August 2025); ‘America Is Collapsing Like Rome’ (Richard Wolff, Cooper Academy, 8 May 2025). Even with Trump, the rhetoric of decline is sometimes no more than a wish – in this case a Chinese one: ‘The Waning of Empire: A Dispatch from the American Decline’ (Kari McKern, China Daily, 22 April 2025).

We need to distinguish between two sides of Trumpism: domestic policy and foreign policy, including trade. In the latter case, Trumpism aligns with a bipartisan debate, running for more than a decade, over the excesses of globalization. After the 2008 financial crisis, American think tanks began to worry about the rise of China. After all, if you look closely, today’s China was invented by the United States. Washington not only provided a still-impoverished country with the capital and technology to industrialize but also presented it with a vast market in which to sell the goods produced with that capital and technology. The US had nurtured a viper in its nest. But globalization also came at a great cost on the home front. Offshoring the industrial base rendered the US working class precarious and marginal, leaving broad layers of the population with no stake in the empire (contrary to the old maxim: what’s good for General Motors is good for America).

In short, it was time to put a brake on what had come to be called hyper-globalization. And in fact every major event – however unrelated in origin – since 2015 had tilted in a deglobalizing direction. First, the Brexit referendum (June 2016); then Trump’s election (November 2016); the Covid-19 pandemic (January 2020–May 2023); the war in Ukraine (from February 2022); the trade war with China (begun during Trump’s first administration, intensified under Biden); and now, Trump’s second term. The difficulty is that for over twenty years the United States had compelled the empire’s subjects – Europeans above all – to globalize: to extend supply lines, delocalize and financialize. And while globalization gave rise to the problem of China and to internal discontent, deglobalization now strains relations with Europe. Under Biden, this was managed by enrolling the Europeans in NATO’s war against Russia; under Trump, by threatening tariffs and imposing more onerous tributes in the form of higher military spending and the purchase of US weaponry.

Since deglobalizing measures have been adopted by both Democrats and Republicans, the difference lies not in their (shared) concern over China’s rise, but in their opposing views on how to neutralize it. Both camps agree on the need to act quickly, before China can close the technological, economic and soft-power gap that still separates it from the United States. The divergence is over how to speed things up. Biden and his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, followed to the letter the dictates of that fascinating – and self-fulfilling – Rand Corporation report, published in 2019, Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options, by pushing Russia to invade Ukraine. The premise was that, in a tripolar nuclear world, the best strategy was to first isolate and defeat Russia, reducing the triumvirate to a duopoly before settling accounts with the main adversary. But the limited effectiveness of the sanctions imposed on Russia, the failure to isolate Moscow from a significant number of countries in the ‘Global South’ (a term that requires scrutiny; we rarely hear about the ‘Global North’) and indeed the tightening of ties between Russia and China, as the Ukraine war has pushed Moscow into Beijing’s arms, have all cast doubt on the Rand Corporation’s strategy.

Hence the current attempt to prise Russia from China by offering peace in Ukraine. Moscow is not indifferent to such enticements because, as anyone who bothers to look at a map of Russia and China will see, south of the border lives 1.4 billion people on 9.5 million square kilometres – heavily exploited land, with vast areas threatened by desertification – while to the north, a mere 35 million inhabit a sprawling 13.1 million square kilometres, which, with climate warming and the thawing of the permafrost, will in time become fertile. The future, in some ways, is already taking shape: Chinese buyers dominate the property market in Siberia’s major cities and are acquiring vast landed estates. If China were to apply to Siberia the same logic that Russia applies to Ukraine, it could claim the re-annexation of all Manchuria. Russia’s real fear is China, not the United States (recall the border conflict between the USSR and Mao’s China in 1969).

It is therefore not an implausible strategy to propose that Moscow rejoin the American fold. There has even been talk of a ‘reverse Nixon strategy’ (Kissinger succeeded in prising China away from Russia; now it’s a matter of doing the opposite). The problem is that, after more than three years of war, Russia has paid a heavy price for the Rand Corporation strategy, and a patched-up peace with Kyiv will no longer suffice.

In this sense, the United States has manoeuvred itself into a geopolitical impasse, one that Trump did nothing to create but is doing nothing to resolve. This lends credence to declinist arguments. Yet these find little confirmation in the reactions of other states to this strategic dilemma – what is striking is rather the acquiescence with which the rest of the world has responded to threats of sanctions and to Washington’s bluster: Europe taking a hit to its pocket, China showing extraordinary restraint in its countermeasures. The fact is that the dollar remains the global reserve currency; the US financial system still governs the world; its investment funds continue to expand into every country; its military power knows no bounds. Indeed, Trump is increasing military spending.

***

One begins to suspect that the United States’s evident internal crisis stems not so much from decline on the world stage as from the hypertrophied power of its empire. A crisis of hyperpower – which breeds the belief that one can do whatever one wants, with no need for restraint, wielding a stick so strong that no carrot is required.

This hyperpower not only applies to the US as an imperial force, but to its entire stratum of giga-billionaires, who control space, the airwaves, communications, language and now even intelligence, and thus feel entitled to the most shameless despotism. Every day brings new manifestations: arbitrary sanctions imposed out of the blue, without any justification, on Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories; or the threat of exorbitant tariffs against Lula’s Brazil, at a time when trade between the two countries stands at a US surplus of $8 billion – a surplus that has been unbroken for eighteen years.

Only hyperpower can explain how the Trump administration can get away with employing the Caligula method for its appointments. Just as Caligula made a horse a senator to show his contempt for the Senate, secure in the knowledge that the Roman Empire, at its apogee, could weather his eccentricities, so Trump can afford to appoint a billionaire from the world of wrestling as Secretary of Education, or name as Defense Secretary a semi-alcoholic television host (once filmed drunkenly singing ‘Let’s kill all the Muslims’) who was dishonourably discharged from the Marines.

Comparisons with the past are always, in the strict sense, anachronistic. Yet one conclusion suggests itself: globalization has had another, less foreseen, malign effect for Washington – detaching its ruling class from the country. Globalized capitalism is no longer patriotic; it feels (wrongly) disconnected from the fate of its homeland. It imagines it can do without it, indulging the fantasy, as many Silicon Valley tycoons do, of living in New Zealand or on an extraterritorial platform at sea, while continuing to enjoy its fortune and ruling the world. What it fails to grasp is that all its power depends on the imperial character of the United States; without that, the members of this ruling class are nothing – castaways in a gilded cage at the far end of the Pacific. It is the same mechanism by which the great landowners of the Roman Empire ceased to think of themselves as cives Romani, the plebeians stopped enlisting in the legions, and Dalmatian, Iberian or Numidian praetorians could auction off the empire to the highest bidder. Today, for the first time, it seems America’s ruling class has lost interest in the United States – and in Americans.

For two centuries, Europeans have made the monumental error of underestimating the American ruling class – a class that, in less than a hundred years, conquered the globe: sea, air, space, finance, currency, the imagination; that was able to produce a stratum of public and private administrators who, for better or worse, managed the entire planet. This was a ruthless, unscrupulous class. Yet for their own advantage, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Astors – rightly called robber barons – built libraries, hospitals, universities and concert halls. They shot striking workers, but it nevertheless served their interests to see their country prosper. To paraphrase Dr Johnson’s famous remark, they were scoundrels, but patriotic scoundrels. By contrast, the new generation of capitalists appear dematerialized, abstracted from any human context – a class that seems to have made Margaret Thatcher’s great slogan its own: ‘There is no such thing as society.’

So yes – returning to the dichotomies with which we began – the present situation is the latest outcome of the neoliberal, Reaganite revolution. It is therefore a long-term development, of which Trump is merely an epiphenomenon (here lies minimalism), yet at the same time it marks a radical change in the management of empire, with the abandonment of soft power (here maximalism). From an empire whose strength lay in not admitting it was one – the US does not ‘occupy’ us, it ‘defends’ us – to an empire with no qualms about imposing its dominion. This empire is at a moment of absolute supremacy (anti-declinism), though being by far the strongest power in the world does not mean being the only one or being omnipotent. Yet implicit in this overreach, visible in the watermark, is its deepest fragility (declinism): the unravelling of its ruling class – witness the attacks on the universities that train it – and of that class’s relationship to its own state.

This article was originally published in Limes.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘American Decline?’, NLR 135.