The United States: New year, new world order?

Making sense of the ruling class's strategy

The end of 2025 brought with it three important strategic documents written by the planners of U.S. imperialism. These were the president’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), the Council on Foreign Relations’ Economic Security Task Force Report #83 “Winning the Race for Tomorrow’s Technologies,” and the Department of Defense/War’s Annual “Report to Congress on Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China.”

Taken together, the three reports paint a picture of U.S. imperialism’s international standing falling from uncontested dominance to being compelled to game out its place in a new world order. While the United States retains economic and military superiority, the large strides made by Chinese technological advancements and control of strategic sectors are quickly closing the gap. All of the reports point to an economic world system facing stagnation and ever-sharper conflicts between the great powers.

The CFR recognizes that for all countries, “Increasingly, economics and national security have converged…” National economies are being bolstered by state investment and “industrial policy,” largely in weapons and defense sectors. There has also been a sharp rise in the use of export restrictions since 2018, an indication of increased economic aggression.

U.S. stock prices and economic growth have been kept up largely by speculative investment in “artificial intelligence,” data center construction, and mass surveillance technologies. Despite how central these hyper-modern sectors are, the United States is lagging far behind in investment. As the CFR report details, over the last 10 years, “the Chinese government has spent an estimated $900 billion on AI, quantum, and biotech—more than three times U.S. government support for those technologies during the same period.”

The status of the United States as front-runner in semi-conductor production is projected to be coming to an early end. On Dec. 17, Reuters reported an apparently successful act of industrial espionage that has led to Chinese firms building previously out-of-reach extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. China is also leading far ahead of the United States in electric vehicles and lithium batteries, solar panels, and unmanned aerial vehicles (drones).

Spheres of influence and the fall of Europe

The National Security Strategy is particularly clear about reenforcing spheres of influence between the “great” powers. The document declares that the U.S. “will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.” The Monroe Doctrine is a longstanding idea that all of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the closer Pacific Islands should be dominated by the United States. Probably millions of people have been killed as a direct result of this policy.

The great fear by U.S. ruling-class planners is the growing presence of China, and to a lesser extent Russia, in the region and the world. Ending that presence is what the NSS means when it defines the “Trump Corollary” as denying “non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets” in the Western Hemisphere. Military campaigns against Venezuela and other Central and South American countries are part of this strategy.

Also important is the sidelining of Europe as a major bloc and partner of the United States. According to economist Michael Roberts, “Eurozone growth is expected to slow by 0.2 percentage points next year to 1.2 per cent in 2026.” This is well below global GDP growth estimated around 2.6%. European imperialism is quickly losing the last vestiges of formal colonial holdings, particularly in Africa, putting more of the world up for grabs in the new inter-imperialist scramble for territory.

A major change in the current moment is that the ability of Europe to defend itself against Russia is much weaker than before. The United States has made overtures to the Russian government indicating willingness to agree to dividing lines of influence within Ukraine and beyond. The US support for Russia being given its sphere of influence leaves Europe in its most vulnerable position since WW2.

Today, Russia carries out limited military “sabotage” actions in Europe of an unprecedented scope with little European response other than the EU nations trying to improve their defensive posture through greater spending. The U.S. is not going to back NATO actions against Russia and states plans to withdraw from NATO within the decade. All this is complicated by the fact that the loss of Russian oil has been devastating to the German economy and others. European countries are becoming ever more reliant on U.S. energy supplies. That growing dependence  can help to maneuver them, and even potentially Russia, ever more firmly into a position in which they feel they must agree to U.S. business deals.

While calling for a weaker NATO and jettisoning the EU, the NSS and its longer unreleased version point to creating or reinvigorating various multilateral coordinating bodies. This includes the idea of creating a “Core 5” (C5) coalition comprised of the U.S., China, Russia, India, and Japan. The C5 idea indicates that the US no longer wants to rule globally with the EU. The US ruling class increasingly sees the EU as an obstacle to reordering economic relations with Russia and China, each in their spheres of influence.

Contradictions of “decline”

In the National Security Strategy and many public pronouncements, the Trump administration repeats the phrase “peace through strength.” The phrase is an attempt to connect with increasing rejection of “forever wars” and U.S. interventions abroad in the name of “democracy.” However, any apparent anti-militarist sentiment from the administration is an obvious and cynical fraud as Trump’s comments on the need to “reclaim stolen” resources from Venezuela makes clear.

More fundamentally, “peace through strength” signals commitment to a purported strategy of deterrence and detente—especially in regard to relations with China in the Asian and Pacific sphere. That is, as with the old USSR, arm yourself to the teeth in hopes that China will back off from disrupting the balance of power. Obviously, the strategy is applied differently in Latin America than it is in the Pacific. In the Americas, and in a far lesser degree in Africa, the U.S. is not afraid to engage in military action, which it thinks it will win since its military dominance in these areas of the world is unchallenged. 

The NSS document appears to favor the imposition of a “fortress” mentality in U.S. policy, which could cause the U.S. to be more selective in its military and “soft power” interventions, at least compared to the beginning of the century when the country began two open military occupations. At the same time, as the DoD’s annual report on China and the CFR’s Task Force reports show, China is quickly approaching the point of achieving basic military parity in key conflict zones, including the South China Sea.

Looking regionally, one immediately sees the call for “peace through strength” really means taking offensive military postures all over the world. Peace is not possible through imperialist “strength” or “diplomacy” or any other means as long as capitalism remains in the world. Lack of trust within the ruling class, competition, struggles between countries over trade chokepoints and other factors are all permanent factors destabilizing the world order. Where the United States declares exclusive ownership of the Western hemisphere, China is not allowed a similar predominance in the South China Sea.

The NSS identifies Taiwan’s geographic location, even more than its semi-conductor industry, as the reason why the country is essential for U.S. interests. Located between the East and South China Seas, along a trade route “that one-third of global shipping passes annually,” Taiwan is both a likely starting-place for inter-imperialist war and also the justification for proposed U.S. military expansion in the region. In the name of “deterring conflict,” the NSS calls for “preserving military overmatch” in the South China Sea.

That means to “harden and strengthen [U.S.] military presence in the Western Pacific.” In order to harden, strengthen, and dominate, “America’s diplomatic efforts should focus on pressing our First Island Chain allies and partners to allow the U.S. military greater access to their ports and other facilities, to spend more on their own defense, and most importantly to invest in capabilities aimed at deterring aggression. This will interlink maritime security issues along the First Island Chain while reinforcing U.S. and allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible.”

The United States is not and cannot be prepared to simply hand over control of important trade routes, supply chains, and key technologies to the next highest bidder. Despite handwaving at “peace,” U.S. strategy with regard to China is to maintain and showcase military dominance through adventurism by itself and its allies and pushing out Chinese investment internationally. Chinese capitalism is also playing this game, although with a quickly growing economy, untested military with a small global presence, and awareness that anything can be a pretext for US attacks they have been more slow and willing to work within international institutions.

One of the unresolved parts of the new world order is the role of the United States military and its private sector partners. The perception that Trump the candidate would end U.S. interventions abroad was a major factor in his election. Every country increasing their own national defense budgets to take up the “burden” previously shouldered by the US in institutions like NATO and other regional military blocs is a central part of the Trump administration’s (and Project 2025’s) strategic vision. At the same time, giving up the right to deploy troops anywhere in the world, with a few partial exceptions, would be an unacceptable concession for the U.S. ruling class.

Towards an internationalist workers’ movement

We are in a period of deep uncertainty and disorder. The uneven development of capitalism and relative decline of the United States are shaking apart the old world hierarchies. At the same time, this is only making a violent and genocidal social system more destructive. There is no end to U.S. imperialism through this process alone. The United States is trying to create a fortress in the Western Hemisphere, internally constructed of bourgeois police states and externally the launching pad for imperialist adventures and wars.

Working people have nothing to gain from going along with our ruling class’s drive towards nationalism and war. Instead, we need to be fighting for international solidarity and mobilizing against imperialist wars and occupations. The only way out of the increasingly desperate situation for the United States is by working and oppressed people breaking with all political institutions of U.S. imperialism and organizing in our own name, based on an internationalist, socialist program.

First published here by Workers’ Voice