The following article is an updated summary of a much longer piece that the author published on Substack. Written as a contribution to Jacobin Revista, this article remains unpublished. A Spanish translation appeared on Jacobin No. 12, “La Ilustración Oscura,” July/August 2026, pp. 116–128.

“The immense global solidarity movement that has developed since the 7 of October 2023, isn’t simply motivated by the ferocity and immorality of the Israeli response, but represents an increasingly strong political identification that treats the suffering and struggles of the Palestinians as not a special case, an exception, but as a concentrated expression of the structural injustices that define the present global situation.”

— Alex Callinicos

The Marxist critique of imperialism

We live in an era of growing and increasingly dangerous geopolitical turmoil summed up by the Ukraine War, the Gaza genocide, and the US-Israeli attacks on Iran. This has to be seen against the background of the broader multi-dimensional crisis of the capitalist system that has developed since the financial crash of 2007-8 (Callinicos 2023). Mainstream academic paradigms are unable to make sense of these developments. It is my contention that the Marxist critique of imperialism can help us understand what is happening. In this opening section I set out my theoretical framework before proceeding to more detailed analysis.

Marxists understand capitalist imperialism as a global system of exploitation, domination, and competition. This understanding is already implicit in Marx’s writings, but, at the beginning of the twentieth century, confronted with the growing conflicts among the Great Powers that led to the two world wars, Marxists sought to develop a more generalized understanding of imperialism whose theoretical high-points are Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital, Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy.

The key features of the classical Marxist theory of imperialism are as follows: (1) Luxemburg, Lenin, and Bukharin all conceptualize imperialism as not an accident, or optional policy, but a structural consequence of the process of capital accumulation. Lenin and Bukharin critically adopt Rudolf Hilferding’s theory of finance capital, according to which the growing concentration of economic power gives rise to the domination of the banks, in coordination with nation-states, over industrial capital. (2) These transformations led to what David Harvey and I have interpreted in parallel though independent ways as the intersection of economic and geopolitical competition that becomes visible at the end of the nineteenth century (Harvey 2003; Callinicos 2009). Capitals, increasingly operating transnationally, rely on “their” states to promote their interests; correlatively, state managers have an interest in ensuring that these capitals continue to prosper and provide the weapons systems and other resources needed to support their military capabilities. (3) There is therefore a tension between the internationalization of capital, reflected, for example, in the nineteenth century expansion of world trade and investment, or in the globalization era at the end of the twentieth century, and what Bukharin describes as state capitalism, the growing interdependence of nation-states and private firms (Bukharin, 1929, ch. VIII). (4) Finally, imperialism is caught up in what Trotsky would call a process of uneven and combined development that constantly destabilizes the relations between states. This is a crucial innovation by Lenin, who argues that the economically driven ascent and decline of imperial powers makes impossible Karl Kautsky’s vision of “ultra-imperialism,” a pacific global cartel; this argument applies also to Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s more recent conception of transnational Empire.

Capitalist imperialism therefore exists only in the plural, as a struggle for domination among rival powers (though when this struggle leads to the emergence of a hegemonic power, this may result in institutionalized forms of interstate cooperation such as the international liberal order currently in crisis: Callinicos 2009: chs. 4 and 5, Panitch and Gindin, 2012). Marxists understand this interstate anarchy as a specification of the two constitutive features of capitalism as a mode of production, the exploitation of wage-labour and the competitive accumulation of capital. For Marx, it is the competition among the “many capitals” composing the capitalist class that enforces on them jointly the tendencies inherent in the system, most fundamentally the structural imperative to maximize productivity and intensify exploitation (Callinicos 2014a: 139-58). The distinctiveness of modern imperialism is that it represents the historical moment where the geopolitical competition already present in historically variable forms in precapitalist modes of production becomes subsumed under this logic of competitive accumulation.

This analysis must nevertheless be rooted in the logic of the class struggle, as Lucia Pradella has shown. In Chapter 25 of Capital, Volume I “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”, Marx argues that the development of capitalism, involving the adoption of increasingly capital-intensive production, generates a “relative surplus population” or “industrial reserve army,” of unemployed and underemployed workers whose pressure on the labour market tends to depress the level of wages. Pradella points out that this chapter “ends with a detailed study of Ireland: ‘an agricultural district of England, which happens to be divided by a wide stretch of water from the country for which it provides corn, wool, cattle and industrial and military recruits”’ (Pradella 2010: 238; Marx 1976: 854). Thanks to the catastrophe of the Great Famine of the 1840s and the longer-term dispossession and pauperization of the bulk of the Irish peasantry, British industrial capitalism secured a low-paid migrant workforce.

Transnational imperialism and capitalist exploitation are thus mutually reinforcing. The same dual optic informs the later Marxist critique of capitalist imperialism. Luxemburg, Lenin, and Bukharin, leading figures in the revolutionary wing of the international socialist movement, opposed the First World War as an inter-imperialist struggle. They supported neither the Entente nor the Central Powers, and saw the conflict as signalling the necessity of socialist revolution to bring an end to the entire system whose competitive logic had given rise to this carnage. It was Lenin who drew out most sharply the political implications — not simply revolutionary defeatism (anti-imperialists should welcome defeat of their “own” government as a means of promoting revolution), but also the strategic understanding that the war meant colonized peoples oppressed by the imperialist powers were more likely to revolt, offering revolutionary socialists in the belligerent countries a crucial ally in their struggle to overthrow the system (Callinicos 2018). The subsequent history of this Marxist critique of imperialism is not our subject here, but we will see how the critique can illuminate the present.

The logic of contemporary inter-imperialist competition

To understand the widening geopolitical fracture, we must start from the crisis of US hegemony. It is the product of a conjunction of three developments — the economic and geopolitical ascent of China, the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-9, and the failure of Washington’s occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The US also suffered defeat in Indochina in the mid-1970s, but it did not then face a geopolitical rival whose economic and military capabilities were rapidly advancing. The GFC didn’t simply further undermine the credibility of US hegemony, but precipitated the two main centres of Western capitalism in North America and Western Europe into “secular stagnation,” while China rapidly overcame the effects of the crash and began to draw the global South along in its economic wake. The crash and its aftermath — especially the austerity policies pursued in the US and the EU — powered the political advance of a far right quick to exploit the failure of the neoliberal centre.

The geoeconomic contest between the US and China represents the collision between Beijing’s drive to upgrade its huge manufacturing industry technologically and Washington’s efforts to defend the primacy of its Big Tech giants — above all, the “Magnificent Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla), a struggle therefore waged over the production of advanced chips and of the technologies and scarce raw materials on which a “green transition” depends. Hence the abandonment by Western states, led by the US, of the neoliberal ban on state-directed industrial policy in order to enhance their economic and military competitiveness, and Trump’s pursuit of tariffs.

China is rapidly rising up the global economic hierarchy, leaving behind its old status as a “semi-peripheral” society, and developing productive capacities that are pushing it ahead of the advanced capitalist “core” of old. As the Financial Times puts it, “Vicious domestic competition, coupled with vast industrial scale, ample pools of engineering talent and some of the highest subsidies in the world, has generated world-beating Chinese champions in EVs [electric vehicles], solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and a lengthening list of advanced manufacturing sectors’ (McMorrow, Fleming, Foster, and Leahy 2026).

A proper assessment of the global impact of China’s rise needs to consider the geoeconomic and geopolitical logic of functioning as the largest manufacturing and exporting economy in the world. The state managers of such an economy must secure reliable access to markets for its products and to the raw materials and components needed to make them, which necessitates ensuring that the interstate system can facilitate this access. These requirements were an important aspect of Anglo-German competition in the early twentieth century. They also were a powerful motivating factor in US construction of a liberal capitalist transnational order after the Second World War (Panitch and Gindin 2012). Beijing’s push outwards — for example, the Belt and Road Initiative and now the Global Developmental Initiative — represents moves in the same direction.

According to the Financial Times, in response to the growing economic war with the West, “China is accelerating efforts to construct an alternative trade architecture that is insulated from US influence and centred upon the developing world, “which now receives more Chinese exports than developed economies. “The architecture under construction revolves around a China-centric network of bilateral and regional ‘free trade agreements’ (FTAs), which allow for trade at low tariffs while also promoting direct investment flows, Chinese officials and trade experts say” (Kynge and Fray 2024). Inevitably these efforts collide with the increasingly dysfunctional US-led regime — thus the World Trade Organization is paralysed thanks to Washington’s protectionist turn.

February 2022 marked another, more threatening step-change in this conflict, with the outbreak of a major war on the European continent and the polarization of the state system resulting from the Western mobilization behind Ukraine and China’s support for Russia. This fracturing of the international system results from a developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers.

In some respects, the most interesting actor is Russia under Vladimir Putin. During the “unipolar moment” in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the US was presiding over what seemed to be an unstoppable surge of neoliberal globalization, post-Soviet Moscow’s pleas for recognition as a partner in global governance could be brushed aside, Yugoslavia dismantled against its unavailing opposition, and NATO expanded across Eastern and Central Europe to its borders. Putin imposed order on the warring beneficiaries from the highly corrupt privatization of state industries under his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, adopted a rigorously neoliberal economic policy regime internally, and used Russia’s position in the global economy as one of the main energy producers to rebuild its military power and geopolitical influence externally. When the political rivalries among post-Soviet oligarchs in Ukraine, which had not been coercively regulated as they had under Putin, tipped the country westwards in the “Maidan revolution” of 2013-14, Russia’s massive security apparatus intervened to take control of Crimea and encourage separatist movements in southeastern Ukraine. The full-scale invasion eight years later sought to bind the whole country to the Russian sphere of influence.

So far so familiar. But it is noteworthy that Russia hasn’t simply asserted itself in its “near abroad,” but has become a significant actor in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) — the very region where since the 1980s the US has been the most ready to resort to violence to maintain its hegemony. This began with Russia’s 2015 entry into the Syrian war. Russia also became involved in the perennial civil war that has gripped Libya ever since the 2011 NATO intervention, and, often through the agency of the Wagner mercenary group, has been able to exercise military and economic influence on African states stretching from Sudan to Mozambique and to exploit the spreading backlash against France in its former African colonies.

What made possible this expansion of Russian power into MENA and beyond? Two interconnected determinants seem crucial. First, Putin exploited the gap left by the Obama administration’s abortive efforts, after defeat in Iraq, to reduce direct US involvement in conflicts in the region and to shift resources towards addressing the emergence of China as a serious peer competitor. The destabilizing effects of the Iraq War and the Arab revolutions of 2011 in any case encouraged regional powers — most notably Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — to seek to increase their influence, notably through intervening in the local wars that developed after 2011 — Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Sudan. Russia inserted itself into this band of powerbrokers. Secondly, the self-assertion of these regional powers was closely interwoven with the emergence of new centres of capital accumulation in the region — most notably in the Gulf, but also the expansion of export manufacturing in Anatolia, and Israel’s “digital militarism” (Alexander 2018). Today’s MENA “sub-imperialisms” are able to flex their muscles more, thanks to receding US hegemony, the intensification of geopolitical competition, and their own more robust economies.

The pivotal role played by the region in global energy production adds a further dimension to these interstate manoeuvres (Labban 2008, Thompson 2022, Hanieh 2024). Russia figures as an important partner to Saudi Arabia in the OPEC+ cartel at a time when the US, thanks to the shale revolution, has re-emerged as a leading energy producer and therefore as a competitor — most notably in overtaking Russia as supplier of natural gas to Europe. China is now the biggest importer of energy from the Gulf, and its diplomacy has become more active, most notably in brokering the restoration of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023.

The Ukraine War itself thus represented a radicalization of the global struggle that was already developing between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. The US and other Western powers were already heavily involved in training and supporting the Ukrainian military from 2014-15 onwards. The most striking evidence of Western involvement in Ukrainian security prior to the invasion is provided by the reports in both the Washington Post and the New York Times documenting in detail the role played by the Central Intelligence Agency in reconstructing, training, funding, equipping, and guiding Ukraine’s intelligence agencies after the “Maidan revolution”(Miller and Khurshudyan 2023, Adam and Schwirtz 2024).

The massive surge in weapons supplies to Ukraine by the NATO powers and closely aligned states such as Australia must be seen in this context. From the Western side, the Ukraine conflict has been a proxy war waged to weaken and drain a potential challenger, an inter-imperialist conflict in the kind of terms that Lenin and Luxemburg characterized the First World War (Tengely-Evans 2023, Bieler and Morton 2024). A detailed retrospective investigation by the New York Times reveals the close involvement of the US and Britain in the actual conduct of the war and concedes that “Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of US-Russia proxy wars” (Entous 2025).

The global dimensions of this struggle result particularly from the efforts of the US and the EU to mobilize the rest of the world, not simply to condemn the invasion but to participate in the economic sanctions they speedily imposed on Russia. The latter effort was a remarkable failure. China, while seeking to restrain Putin from threatening nuclear war, supplied Russia with the high-tech goods needed to sustain its defence industry, while the leading states in the global South refused to impose sanctions. Russian energy exports, hitherto crucial to powering the West European economy, were rerouted eastwards.

Nevertheless, the Russian economy, far from collapsing, was estimated by the International Monetary Fund to grow faster in 2023-4 than any of the G7, thanks to buoyant energy revenues and the adoption of ‘military Keynesianism’ by Putin’s highly skilled economic team, forcing the Financial Times grudgingly to acknowledge its “surprising resilience” (Stognei and Seddon 2024). Superiority in materiel, numbers, and airpower allowed Moscow to blunt Ukraine’s 2023 offensive and slowly to push forward, at a terrible cost in casualties. Russia is now more tightly bound to China than it was before the invasion, but it is also arguably more of a global power thanks to the failure of the Western efforts to isolate it and the new markets Russian oil and gas have found in Asia.

Political economy of a genocidal war

The Marxist critique of imperialism further offers a distinctive perspective on the broader widening of the geopolitical fracture that the war in Gaza has produced. Modern settler colonialism must be understood as both a distinctive form of violence, dispossession, and domination, and a specific imperialist configuration. In his pioneering analysis of Israel as a settler-colonial state, Fayez Sayegh points to the relative weakness of the initial Zionist settlements in Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to how their prospects were transformed by Britain and France’s decision during the First World War to carve up the Ottoman Empire (Sayegh 1965, chs I and II). The strategic thinking behind the November 1917 Balfour Declaration stating the British government’s support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ was expressed by Sir Ronald Storrs, first Military Governor of Jerusalem under the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-48): “the enterprise was one which blessed him that gave as well as him that took, by forming for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism” (Storrs 1937: 405).

Once the State of Israel had been established, Gershom Shoken, editor and publisher of the liberal Israeli daily Ha’aretz, explained in September 1951 the services it could offer the Western imperial powers:

strengthening Israel helps the Western powers to maintain equilibrium and stability in the Middle East. Israel is to become the watchdog … if for any reason the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied on to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy toward the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible (Bober 1972: 16-17).

The Pentagon had already identified Israel’s strategic importance in respect of the main US preoccupation in the region, securing the supply of oil to Western Europe (Gendizier 2015: 646-7). The parameters laid out in the early years of the Cold War — the strategic contribution of Israeli military power in securing Middle East energy for the West and the simultaneous need to accommodate the Arab states emerging from the British and French colonial empires — continue to guide US policy towards Israel. The steady flow of generous US aid (adjusted for inflation, US military aid to Israel totalled $251.2bn between 1959 and 2024), irrespective of the degree of harmony or disharmony between the two governments, and supplemented crucially by Germany, has allowed Israel hugely to extend its military capabilities and to develop into a major producer of arms and related technologies, e.g. cybersecurity (Bilmes, Hartung, and Semler, 2024: 10, Bresheeth-Žabner 2020: ch. 10). The effect has been to make Israel no longer simply a supplier of security to the Western bloc but a valuable economic and military partner.

The relationship between the US and Israel nevertheless involves a convergence of interests between two ruling classes of greatly unequal power, a contradictory unity rather than a simple identity secured either by the influence of the Israel lobby on US foreign policy or by Israel being merely Washington’s puppet. A critical determinant is the specific logic of Zionist settler colonialism. As Sayegh puts it, “Nowhere in Africa or Asia — not even in South Africa or Rhodesia — has European race-supremacism expressed itself so passionate a zeal for racial exclusiveness and for expulsion of ‘native’ populations across the fronters of the settler-state, as it has in Palestine, under the compulsion of Zionist doctrines” (Sayegh 1965: 24).

This “zeal … for expulsion” springs from the very nature of the Zionist project, the construction of an exclusively Jewish nation-state on the territory of Palestine. The straightforward methods of extermination used in North America and Australasia to clear the land of its indigenous populations were impossible in postwar Palestine. The Nakba of 1947-9 partially achieved the task through a combination of massacre and forcible expulsion (Pappé 2007). But this left the Palestinians co-existing with their conquerors, as a minority in Israel itself, as a population under occupation in the territories seized by the IDF in 1967, and as refugees in neighbouring countries. Israel thus exists in a structural condition of insecurity, at permanent war with the Palestinians, whom it subjects to an apartheid system of segregation and surveillance .

It’s important to see this condition not simply in political but in class terms. As Fredric Jameson magisterially puts it,

in our time all politics is about real estate; and this from the loftiest statecraft to the most petty manoeuvring around local advantage. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as global scale. Whether you think of the issue of Palestine or of gentrification and zoning in American small towns, it is that peculiar and imaginary thing called private property in land which is at stake. The land is not only an object of struggle between the classes, between rich and poor; it defines their very existence and the separation between them (Jameson 2015: 130).

Marx says in his celebrated account in Part 8 of Capital, Volume I, of the process of “primitive” or “original” accumulation, through which a class of wage-labourers separated from the means of subsistence and therefore economically compelled to sell their labour-power to capital is created: “The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process” (Marx 1976: 876) The history of the Zionist project is a process of continuing and still incomplete expropriation of the Palestinians. Indeed, Michael Burawoy has located the specificity of Zionist settler colonialism here. The difference between apartheid South Africa and the State of Israel is that between “a settler colonialism built on labour exploitation —  a relation of inclusion based on interdependence, conducive to compromise — and one built on land expropriation: a relation of exclusion based on irreconcilable conflict” (Burawoy 2025: 143-4).

Thus, the settlers sought the Palestinians’ land, not their labour. The insistence that Jewish bosses employ Jewish workers was one of the founding principles of the Yishuv, rigorously enforced by Histadrut, the Zionist labour federation. This pattern changed especially after 1967, with Palestinians in the occupied territories suffering dispossession to make way for Zionist settlements and surviving as a low-paid, racially oppressed migratory workforce for Israeli capital. The Palestinian intifadas of 1987-93 and 2000-5 led to increasing restrictions on Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza working in Israel and efforts to replace them with imported migrant labourers.

William Robinson and Hoai-an Nguyen argue that the reduction of the Palestinians to the kind of surplus population analysed by Marx in Capital creates the conditions for the Israeli state to shift in the openly genocidal course taken by the IDF offensive in Gaza:

The siege of Gaza and the West Bank is a form of primitive accumulation aimed at cracking open new space for transnational accumulation … Gaza thus becomes a potent symbol of the plight of surplus humanity around the world. Decades of globalization and neoliberalism have relegated great masses of people to marginal existence. New technologies based on artificial intelligence combined with displacement generated by conflict, economic collapse, and climate change will exponentially increase the ranks of surplus humanity. The ILO reported as far back as the turn of century that some one-third of the global labour forces had been made superfluous (Robinson and Nguyen 2024).

War liberalism and its enemies

In its broad contours, Robinson and Nguyen’s argument was anticipated by Susan George in her well-documented satire The Lugano Report, where she imagines a working party of experts recommending that the well-being of capitalism in the twenty-first century depends chiefly on promoting drastic “population reduction through conquest, war, famine or disease” (George 1999: 87). The catastrophes the century has already witnessed have given George’s text a prophetic quality.

Robinson and Nuguyen’s version nevertheless requires qualification, for three reasons. First, it’s important not to absolutize the concept of surplus population. Marx himself saw the industrial reserve army, composed of different layers of the potential workforce not fully integrated into wage labour, as a complex phenomenon involving different degrees of separation from capitalist production and varying in size and composition depending on the trajectory taken by the accumulation process (Pradella 2010: 246-50, Callinicos 2014a: 251-3, 305-9).

More specifically, Robinson and Nuguyen overstate Palestinians’ exclusion from wage labour. The vulnerability to super-exploitation of Palestinian workers from the territories means their employment is irresistible to Israeli capitalists; they continue to dominate the key construction sector (Englert 2023). Within the borders of Israel itself, the Financial Times points out, “Palestinian-Israelis play a significant role in many sectors, including health, where they account for about 40 per cent of the workforce, the pharmaceutical sector, construction, agriculture and call centres” (England 2023).

Secondly, the devastation of Gaza and the plans for its clearing don’t follow an ineluctable economic logic but depend on highly specific political conditions. Now embraced by the Trump administration, these plans were initially an opportunistic response by Israeli securocrats and far-right politicians to the attacks mounted by Palestinian resistance organisations on 7 October 2023. A supercharged version of the standard Israeli policy of deterring resistance by mass killing and physical destruction has shaded off into a strategy to rid Gaza of Palestinians by direct violence, disease, starvation — and (so its authors hope) emigration as the only means of escape from the condition to which its inhabitants have been reduced. This has in turn been made possible by the willingness of the Western powers, led by the US and Germany, to allow Israel to pursue this strategy in the longest war in its history and to supply it with the weapons required for its implementation.

Arguably the best way of understanding this Western complaisance is as expressing the determination of the increasingly besieged liberal imperialist powers to dig in against their enemies. One might call this stance “war liberalism.’” The liberal “rules-based international order” is facing a serious challenge both from Chinese economic competition and from Beijing’s and Moscow’s promotion of an alternative “multilateral” order. It also has several exposed bridgeheads under direct security threat — most notably actually Ukraine and potentially Taiwan. Israel is another bridgehead. It remains a strategic asset for the US thanks to its military capabilities, the “digital militarism” that makes it an attractive partner for Western defence sectors, and its increasing involvement in supplying energy that, once again, is crucial to an EU seeking alternatives to Russian oil and gas. But the moral and material backing given Israel by the Western powers after the 7 October attacks has increased their isolation. The Financial Times quoted a “senior G7 diplomat”: ‘We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South … All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again” (Foy 2023).

Liberal imperialism also has a powerful enemy within its own political system, in the shape of the far right, many of whose leaders are sympathetic to the Putin regime. The advent of the second Trump presidency represented a severe disruption of war liberalism and more broadly of the politico-economic order it seeks to defend. The new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, announced in his confirmation hearings: “The postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us” (Rubio 2025). Trump’s rapid move to try to find an end the Ukraine War and normalize relations with Russia and his initiatives to entrench US domination of the Western Hemisphere (tariffs against Mexico and Canada, threats to seize control of Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal) have shattered the coalition Biden had sought to reconstruct.

At least some in the Trump administration see its tariffs policy as an instrument for not simply reconfiguring global trade but also constructing a more narrowly defined economico-geopolitical bloc around the US. Stephen Miran, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, foresees that

Friends are inside the security and economic umbrella, but there is much more burden-sharing. Based on the scope of that burden-sharing, friends may experience more favourable trade or currency terms. Those outside the security umbrella may also find themselves outside friendly arrangements for international trade and easy access to the US consumer. They will have more aggressive costs imposed on them via tariffs and other policies (Miran 2024: 37).

Nevertheless, there are continuities between the new administration and its liberal imperialist predecessors. On two of the three fronts — East Asia and the Middle East, Trump has been, if anything, more belligerent than Biden. In the latter case, he has embraced the Israeli far right’s plan to take over Gaza, clear it of Palestinians, and redevelop the Strip — a real-estate developer’s genocide. Like Biden before him, he has allowed Netanyahu to tempt him into seeking further to shift the regional balance of power by joining in Israel’s attacks on Iran.

Trump seeks to advance US global interests by clumsily coercing and cajoling allies and opponents into bilateral bargains, a practice punctuated by sudden and erratic reversals. Not surprisingly, therefore, there are many uncertainties about his administration’s global strategy, which have not been resolved by the publication of new National Defence Strategy and National Security Strategy documents in late 2025. In particular, it remains unclear how much priority Trump gives to confronting China in the Pacific. On the other hand, the Iran War marks a return to western Asia, the graveyard of US geopolitics for the past generation. The resulting disruption to energy flows has, however, supported the administration’s efforts to dominate global oil and gas markets (Smyth, Moore, Stylianou, Clark, de la Torre Arenas, and Bernard, 2026).

Trump certainly marks a shift towards un-dissimulated predation, constrained only by the discipline imposed by financial markets, above all that in US Treasury bonds, the lynchpin of the international monetary system. This vulgar imperialism is likely further to weaken the West’s grip on the global South. The inability of the US to defeat Iran and defend its allies in the Gulf — which has emerged as a key zone of global capitalism in recent decades — offers further encouragement for these states (as well as longstanding partners in Europe and East Asia) to look elsewhere for more trustworthy interlocutors.

The main beneficiary is China. The Beijing-led bloc of leading Southern economies, the BRICS, is expanding. The BRICS aren’t a coherent geopolitical and ideological bloc comparable to the US-led alliances. Proposals to supplant the US dollar as the main reserve currency still face formidable obstacles, even though the Trump administration’s erratic course is creating stronger incentives to seek alternatives. Nevertheless, Chinese foreign investment and trade is transforming global economic patterns and giving Southern states greater room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis Washington and Brussels.

The war between the US and Israel and Iran must be seen in this context. It originates in the Netanyahu government’s policy of using ultra-violence to destroy its enemies and impose its dominance in the region. Netanyahu’s success in drawing the US in derives partly from the long-standing hostility towards the Islamic Republican regime that Trump shares with many other members of the US ruling class and partly from the hubris reigning in Washington thanks to the administration’s successes in its own resort to violence, notably in the January 2026 raid on Caracas.

But post-revolutionary Iran is an example of the capitalist development of the region, with an ideologically cohesive and war-hardened Islamist regime presiding over a relatively industrialized and innovative economy. Despite US and Israeli tactical superiority, the Iranian state was able to absorb the bombardment and use its advanced missile and drone capabilities to strike back, devastating US bases in the region, and choking one of the main arteries of the world economy, the Straits of Hormuz, through which up to 20% of global oil and gas pass. Whatever the final reckoning, this war is a world-historic event, a symptom of the shift of the balance of economic and military power away from the US (@policytensor 2026).

Western imperialism is also being challenged from below. This brings me to the third qualification of Robinson and Nguyen’s analysis. The event that sparked the genocide in Gaza took the world even more by surprise than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The 7 October 2023 attacks were undeniably an act of self-assertion by a Palestinian resistance movement that has been opposing Western imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism since the days of the British Mandate. This political reality stands out, irrespective of the ideologies and strategies of the organizations involved and of the atrocities committed on that day — atrocities familiar enough in the history of revolts by the enslaved and the colonized.

The immense global solidarity movement that has developed since isn’t simply motivated by the ferocity and immorality of the Israeli response, but represents an increasingly strong political identification with the cause of Palestine. This identification treats the suffering and struggles of the Palestinians as not a special case, an exception, but as a concentrated expression of the structural injustices that define the present global situation. The chain of military successes Israel has enjoyed, with the complicity of the “global West,” has not dampened this identification. On the contrary, because of the atrocities these successes have involved, and the arrogance of power displayed by Israel’s far right government and its patrons in Washington, Brussels, and Berlin, popular investment in the Palestinians’ plight has grown immensely, as both polling and popular culture bear witness. The high-point of this solidarity to date was reached in September-October 2025, with the Italian general strikes for Palestine (Pradella 2026). This mass radicalization around Palestine indicates that “surplus humanity,” whether in Gaza or elsewhere, are not fated to disappear. Their future depends, once again, on political conditions, and in particular on whether, inspired by struggles such as that of Palestine, growing numbers of the exploited and oppressed can constitute themselves as a political subject capable of winning their own emancipation.

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Feature image: Palestinians in Gaza demonstrating in solidarity against Israeli assault on Jenin, 3 July 2023. Photo: Reuters. Source: Middle East Eye.

Alex Callinicos