By Roger Silverman *
The world today is in a more disturbed state than at any time in the last eight decades. The global structure that came into being after the Second World War had divided the world into three sharply defined sectors: the industrially developed capitalist countries (“the West” plus Japan); the Stalinist states (the USSR and its East European satellites plus China); and the former colonial world.
The very description given to relations between “east” and “west” during this period as the “cold war” confirmed that each side had its own designated “sphere of influence” which was accepted by the other as forbidden territory – at first by a tacit understanding and later explicitly underwritten by formal agreements and mutual disarmament treaties.
Since 1991, this division of the world has been blown apart by a number of changes: the collapse of Stalinism, the effects of globalisation, the relative deindustrialisation of the USA and Western Europe, the meteoric growth of the Chinese economy, and the development of the “BRICS” nations.
The relative stability of the postwar epoch has given way to unprecedented turmoil. The 2008 economic crash precipitated a wave of turbulence worldwide: an upsurge of protests, uprisings, governmental crises, coups, civil wars, the collapse of reformist parties, the sudden eruptions of new left movements, soon to end in their equally sudden collapse, the coming to power of far-right governments east and west…
Intensified global conflict
We are living in an age of intensified global conflict. Hundreds of thousands have died in the Ukraine war, now entering its fifth year. Gaza has suffered outright genocide on a scale not seen since the world war, alongside systematic ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, outbreaks of war throughout the Middle East, and war, insurrection and a massacre in Iran. Civil wars have raged in Yemen, Sudan and Congo. The US raid on Venezuela and the abduction of its president constitute an act of blatant piracy, opening up a renewed era of naked imperial plunder in which all pretence of diplomacy is abandoned. And politicians and generals throughout the world are openly predicting and preparing for a new world war.
All these conflicts are violent manifestations of volatile changes in world relations. In 1960, the US economy was as big as all the next eight countries put together, but its nuclear-armed rival, the USSR, was in second place. By 1991 the USSR had collapsed and the USA had no economic or military rivals.
Following that collapse (an event rather prematurely celebrated by one Western academic as “the end of history”), the USA enjoyed a brief spell of uncontested global domination; but by the mid-2010s its supremacy was already coming under challenge from China, with its combination of state planning and a vast untapped supply of cheap labour, and also from a resurgent Russia, with the formidable military power accumulated during the cold war.
Today the balance of forces has once again shifted dramatically, with the unprecedented growth of China and the rise of the BRICS nations. The IMF lists the gross domestic product of the top ten countries in this order: USA, China, Germany, Japan, India; Britain; France; Italy; Russia; Canada.
However, taking into account purchasing power parity (considered by some a truer measure of an economy’s real size), the World Bank has compiled a very different ranking order: China at number one, followed by the USA; India; Russia; Japan; Germany; Brazil; Indonesia; France; and Britain. By either measure, Asian countries constitute three out of the top five economies.
The end of globalisation
The age of globalisation is over. The liberal dreams of eroding national borders have been shattered. The EU, NATO and the United Nations are all crumbling. The USA has cut $1 billion from United Nations-funded bodies and is busy assembling in its place an exclusive club of countries called the Board of Peace, membership of which is accessible only by Trump’s personal invitation or by a billion-dollar admission fee.
Trump has explicitly declared the postwar global order obsolete. He is a perfect personification of the vulgarisation of decadent capitalism. As a middleman who creates no value but simply buys and sells, he runs the state as “the art of the deal” (to quote the title of his ghost-written book) and treats the presidency as a sequel to his former TV “reality show”, approaching international diplomacy in much the same way as the property speculator he was before, salivating at any prospect of acquiring lucrative real estate. Now elevated to the most powerful player on the world stage, Trump’s foreign policy largely entails the acquisition of property: the oil of Venezuela, the minerals of Ukraine, the rare earth metals of Greenland, the “riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, the Panama Canal, the wealth of Canada, etc…
Trump has said in so many words that he “doesn’t need international law”, since the only constraint on his exercise of power is “my own morality, my own mind”. The distinctions between the USA and Trump personally are continually blurred. For instance, after abducting the president of Venezuela, rather than installing in office as nominal president his ally Machado, he opted instead to leave Maduro’s deputy in office, out of pique that Machado had been awarded the Nobel Prize that he had felt was rightfully his.
This was confirmed once again when he justified his intention to annex Greenland by telling the Norwegian Prime Minister: “Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace.”
There are many more examples of his confusion between the interests of the American ruling class and his own personal ambitions. During the Israeli bloodbath in Gaza, Trump posted on social media an AI-generated video showing the territory transformed into a luxury seaside resort called “Trump Gaza”, which featured Trump and Netanyahu sunbathing, a golden statue of Trump, Trump cavorting with a belly dancer, and Elon Musk being showered with banknotes.
In other contexts, Trump complained that “China is operating the Panama Canal and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama and we’re taking it back“; “How stupid we were to give Greenland back to Denmark“; and “Venezuela’s oil will be sold at its market price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America.”
World’s greatest oil reserves
Incidentally, although Venezuela has the world’s greatest oil reserves, given the current world glut of oil and its consequently depreciated price, the “heavy” nature of its crude oil reserves, and the inefficiency of its oil technology, it is doubtful to what extent Trump’s seizure of its oil fields will be at all attractive to the USA’s oil companies.
World trade is reeling from completely arbitrary on-again-off-again US tariffs, imposed as purely punitive sanctions or bullying bargaining counters, yo-yoing from one day to the next, creating drunken volatility in world markets.That is the parasitic and predatory nature of capitalism today.
Of course coups and wars for plunder or for “regime change” to facilitate it have always been a staple of US foreign policy, from the invasion of the Philippines and Cuba in the Spanish/American war at the turn of the twentieth century, to the coups in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973, to the war on Iraq in 2003, or the kidnapping of foreign heads of state like Noriega from Panama in 1989, or Aristide in Haiti in 2004, to take just a few examples.
While such attacks are nothing new for US imperialism, the diplomatic hypocrisy that was habitually used in the past to justify them is now largely abandoned. In the brutal language of Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”
Redividing the world
US world dominance is nevertheless shrinking. That is what lies behind the White House’s publication of its “National Security Strategy”, which has officially pronounced the end of the “American century”: “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.”
Even more explicitly, the day after the kidnap of Maduro, the State Department posted on X a message in capital letters: “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE” – an admission that the age of “unipolarity” (the short-lived “American century”) is over. As Russia reasserts the dominion of the Tsarist empire in Chechnya, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and (at the cost of a million soldiers killed or wounded) Ukraine; and as China reasserts its grip over Hong Kong and threatens the sovereignty of Taiwan; the USA is in practice acknowledging a new division of interests in the world, in which Latin America is brought firmly back under the heel of the USA, Europe is cut loose and much of its eastern wing left to the mercy of Russia, while the USA reserves the right to contend for control of the Middle East through its bloodthirsty surrogate Israel.
Trump favours the ceding of Donbass to Russia, and giving China a free hand regarding Taiwan: “He (Xi) considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing.“
For now, the USA is imposing what Trump himself has defined as “American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere”: a revived version of the “Monroe doctrine”. He has acknowledged this himself, calling it “the Donroe doctrine”. This means total domination of Latin America, exclusive control of the region’s strategic natural resources, and a new western-hemisphere supply chain cutting out China.
Recognising that manufacturing jobs will never return to the USA, instead its goal is now “near-shore” manufacturing in Latin America on the basis of a US-dominated supply chain. With a compliant regime already in place in Argentina, the USA is forcibly replacing Chinese ports around Panama and Peru and other “Belt and Road” projects. It has kidnapped the president of Venezuela and imposed a military regime in Honduras. It is trying to undermine and ultimately overthrow left governments in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua and even Cuba. And it has threatened to annex not only Greenland but even Canada.
Preparing for war
But empires rarely cede supremacy to a rising adversary without a last-ditch fight. The USA is gearing itself up for an inevitable future conflict with China. And one key element in its preparations is the need somehow to neutralise the potential military threat from the huge nuclear arsenal stockpiled by China’s current ally Russia.
The strategy of the traditional faction of the US ruling class, represented now mainly by the Democrats, had been to seek (at colossal cost and with diminishing returns) to exhaust Russia’s military, diplomatic and economic resources with economic sanctions and a proxy war in Ukraine. The new administration is supplanting this policy with an alternative strategy: to neutralise Russia rather than confront and provoke it.
A split is widening within the US ruling class between the Democratic faction, which is clinging to the old strategy of sapping the resources of China’s nuclear-armed ally Russia to exhaust its capacity, and the Trumpian Republicans who have opted instead for appeasement of Russia, and a return to the partition of the world into rival spheres of influence.
Trump’s Vice-President, Vance, calls for a “focus on East Asia, which is where our most significant competitor is for the next 20 or 30 years”. Even more clearly, his Secretary of State Rubio says: “We’re in a situation now where the Russians have become increasingly dependent on the Chinese…If Russia becomes a permanent junior partner to China in the long term, now you’re talking about two nuclear powers aligned against the United States…It’s not a good outcome for America or for Europe or the world.”
This explains Trump’s determination to end a war which it was already losing in any case, by conceding to Russia the neutrality of Ukraine and ceding to its jurisdiction the territory both of Crimea and Donbas, with their predominantly Russian ethnic populations.
But in foreign policy too, what counts nowadays is not just diplomacy or strategy but money. In return, Trump plans to commandeer the rich mineral, agricultural and energy resources of Western Ukraine. In effect, the outcome will be a partition of Ukraine, with Russia reoccupying the East, and the USA swallowing up the assets of the West.
While neither Russia nor even China at this stage have the means to challenge the USA’s role as pre-eminent global superpower – the USA has 800 overseas naval bases; China, just two – all three are giant regional powers, carving up a redivision of the world into spheres of influence, of which the USA is by far the most powerful militarily. This can only ultimately lead to increasingly dangerous global confrontations.
Concentration of wealth
The old capitalist economies of Europe are in irrevocable decline. In Western Europe, annual growth hardly reaches 1%. Europe’s strongest economy, Germany, actually contracted in 2023 and 2024, and remained stubbornly stagnant in 2025.
Apart from brief blips, the US economy too is slowing down relentlessly. Between 1945 and 1973 it grew by an annual average of 4%; since then it has hardly reached 2%. Over the past 15 years, the average growth rate of the US economy has slumped by nearly half compared to the previous 25 years.
Since the 1980s the US economy has suffered a process of deindustrialisation comparable to that of Britain. The economies of both countries are now largely based on parasitical speculation in finance, real estate, the stock market, etc.
American companies are currently burdened with the heaviest debts in their history, with a total outstanding debt amounting to five times their annual income. Over the past two years, corporate bankruptcies have soared by 87%.
At the same time, the world’s super-rich have enjoyed a colossal rise in their wealth. The world at the beginning of 2026 has more dollar billionaires than ever: 3,028 (247 more than one year earlier). They’re richer than ever, and their wealth is soaring at unprecedented speed. In the year 2000, the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires had amounted to just $1 trillion. In recent years it has swelled from £12.2 trillion in 2023, to £14.2 trillion in 2024, to $16.1 trillion in 2025. Elon Musk has just accepted a business deal whereby he is due to become the world’s first dollar trillionaire.
Within the five years 2020-2025, the collective wealth of the billionaires grew by 81% ($8.2 trillion), to $18.3 trillion – enough, according to Oxfam, to eradicate global poverty 26 times over.
This has compounded a colossal rise in inequality. The USA has the grossest income inequality of all the G7 countries, as well as the lowest life expectancy. In 2011, 400 people had owned more wealth than the bottom half of the whole American population; by 2019 this had shrunk to just three.
Globally, 60,000 people (just 0.001% of the world population) own as much wealth as the bottom half (over four billion people). Similarly, when it comes to earnings, the top 10% earn more than the other 90%, while the poorest half earn less than 10% of total earnings (World Inequality Report 2026).
While the wealth of the world’s richest 1% at one end of the scale has trebled since 1989, at the other, that of its poorest 50% had not grown at all in the same three and a half decades.
It is this gross concentration of wealth that explains the nature of US politics today.
Plutocracy – rule by the rich
In this grotesque nightmare society, every kind of monstrosity flourishes. Social life within the USA is rotting, resembling more and more the end days of the Roman empire. Over 48 million Americans have a drug- or alcohol-related disorder. In the year 2025 there were 425 mass shootings (defined as incidents in which at least four people were killed or wounded): that means more than one mass shooting every day. These and other horrific symptoms are hallmarks of a terminally sick society.
In the year since Trump took office, paramilitary troops have patrolled major cities, suspected migrants snatched from the streets, over 605,000 deported and almost two million driven by sheer terror to flee the country voluntarily. Hundreds of thousands of state employees have been furloughed or permanently sacked.
The threadbare tissue of constitutional legality has been ripped open, a process foreshadowed in the 2021 Capitol riot, and now in the occupation of one city after another by the paramilitary federal state terror army ICE, with its free licence to kidnap, incarcerate and murder.
The spectacle of ICE’s thugs rampaging through one US city after another, randomly rounding up innocent victims, incarcerating them indefinitely in concentration camps on US soil and abroad, assaulting and sometimes murdering bystanders, has invited comparison with the fascist gangs of pre-war Europe. How justified is this comparison?
Strikebreaking street armies
The ultimate victory of fascism means the physical destruction of the organisations of the organised working class at the hands of strikebreaking street armies. This entails the voluntary surrender by the ruling class of direct political power, in conditions of crisis and deadlock in the class struggle, to an agency of hired mercenaries, once traditional means of control have failed.
Trump and his entourage certainly have fascist ambitions. Musk’s sieg heil salute at Trump’s inauguration was no accident. The mercenary fascist gangs they do have at their disposal, so far relatively small, stand ready for deployment (the Proud Boys, the Oath Takers, the mob which stormed the Capitol in 2021).
But at this stage they are held in reserve. ICE is a terrifying paramilitary force, but so far it remains an agency under the control of the state which could be demobilised at any moment or even disbanded, like Hitler’s SA storm troopers were after his seizure of power.
Under classic fascist regimes, the capitalists and their traditional politicians surrendered political power to an unaccountable dictatorship as their best hope of preserving their property. Trumpism represents on the contrary the direct personal seizure of the functions of the state by a handful of capitalist oligarchs who have amassed into their hands such a vast accumulation of wealth and power that they feel able to dismiss the services of a professional elite to administer their affairs. The combined wealth of this, the richest cabinet in US history, comes to $7.5 billion. This is not a government for the rich – it is a government by the rich.
Far from ceding sovereignty to an unaccountable gangster clique over which it has no immediate control, the Trump regime represents the direct administration of affairs by a capitalist class which has become so concentrated that it has dispensed with an entire culture of statecraft.
The ruling corporations have amassed into their hands such a grotesque accumulation of wealth and power that they no longer require a professional elite to administer their affairs. Far from relinquishing direct power to a fascist dictatorship, they have even dispensed with the finesse, diplomacy and strategic planning of a classic bourgeois state.
So how do we define this new phenomenon? It’s time to retrieve the word plutocracy: literally “rule by the rich”. Of course, the rich have always ruled; but up to now they have entrusted the administration of their rule to a special caste of professional mandarins, politicians and bureaucrats.
Society has become grotesquely polarised
Society today has become so grotesquely polarised, wealth so monstrously concentrated, capitalism so grossly monopolised that the plutocracy feels able to dispense with any requirement to assign its collective interests to a specialised political agency: it now rules directly in its own name.
Naked personal power is concentrated directly in the hands of the multi-billionaires: the venture capitalist Elon Musk (soon to become the world’s first trillionaire); the shopping tycoon Bezos; the social media mogul Zuckerberg; all under the banner of the property speculator Trump. The ruling corporations have amassed into their hands such a grotesque accumulation of wealth and power that they no longer require a professional elite to administer their affairs.
Trotsky commented that at its height the British ruling class was able to plan for decades and even centuries ahead. By contrast, Trump has the strategic foresight of a flea; he switches policy literally several times a day. Trump is the personification of the dominant get-rich-quick class of parasitic property speculators which has abandoned any long-term strategy in search of instant cash gains. Therein lies its imminent downfall.
The more perceptive of the world’s super-rich are alarmed at the dangers ahead. They see the writing on the wall: the imminent threat of a social explosion. There is even a group called the Patriotic Millionaires which conducted a poll showing that over 60% of the 3,900 millionaires they had surveyed were concerned that extreme wealth was a threat to democracy, and that two-thirds of them supported higher taxes on the super-rich to invest in public services. This is a measure not of their philanthropy but of their fear of revolution. Predictably, their call was ignored.
Nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires from 24 countries signed an open letter to the recent World Economic Forum meeting at Davos: “A handful of global oligarchs with extreme wealth have bought up our democracies; taken over our governments; gagged the freedom of our media; placed a stranglehold on technology and innovation; deepened poverty and social exclusion; and accelerated the breakdown of our planet.
“What we treasure, rich and poor alike, is being eaten away by those intent on growing the gulf between their vast power and everyone else. We all know this. When even millionaires like us recognise that extreme wealth has cost everyone else everything else, there can be no doubt that society is dangerously teetering off the edge of a precipice.”
We can only agree.
*Roger Silverman is a member of the Workers International Network (WIN)
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