Just over a month after Donald Trump took office as President of the United States, with the tech oligarch Musk by his side, the list of initiatives and measures that the tandem at the helm of the still-leading world power is prepared to implement is already quite extensive. From all of them, it is not difficult to see their firm determination to establish a new “common sense”—as they themselves define it—an ultraliberal economic paradigm, authoritarian in politics and reactionary in culture, in service of their MAGA project, that is, their steadfast intention to drastically halt the imperial decline their country has been suffering for some time.

Several reflections and critiques have already appeared in viento sur and other similar alternative media about the significance of this new White House presidency. In this article, I shall focus on the implications of the steps announced primarily on the geopolitical front: beginning with their aspirations to acquire Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, followed by strengthening their total support for Netanyahu in the genocidal policy he is implementing against the Palestinian people and, of course, by their de-demonisation of Putin and willingness to recognise the territories occupied by Russia in Ukraine (in exchange, of course, for keeping a substantial portion of the rare earth minerals...).

Obviously, this strategy serves a neo-imperial project that aims to gradually expand its backyard, vassalise Europe, seek détente with Russia and guarantee control of the Middle East in order to focus on the Indo-Asian region and, above all, on the geostrategic competition with China. All this within the framework of a technological, commercial and extractivist war on a global scale, in the name of the need to prioritise the protection of American WASPs [White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant] and their now-questioned imperial lifestyle against the rest of the world. The practical viability of this entire project, particularly its effects on the American economy and society, but also in the face of resistance beginning to manifest from very different fronts, remains to be seen.

Despite the confusion that this radical shift may have generated on the international stage, it is not difficult to understand that it is framed within a general context of increasingly interlinked crises—with the ecological crisis as its maximum expression—and the consequent entry into an increasingly competitive zero-sum game in the struggle for resources in “a world where elites believe the pie can no longer grow. From there, the only way to preserve or improve their position, in the absence of an alternative system, becomes predation. This is the era we are entering”, as Arnaud Orain concludes.[1]

Superoligarchy, regime change and a new colonial division

An era in which the “financial and communications control superoligarchy” (Louça, 2025) aims to combine its market power with direct control of state power, with Elon Musk as the ultimate expression of its willingness to impose its interests on an international scale.

A leap forward that seeks to rely on an alliance with those governments and political forces already acting under the impulse of the reactionary International to, as J.D. Vance expressed at the Munich summit, promote a genuine “regime change” in those countries where forms of liberal democracy inherited from the post-World War II antifascist consensus still survive.

Thus, although it is still too early to consider that this project will achieve its main objectives, it does seem evident that we are moving from an interregnum to the beginning of another phase in which the reconfiguration of the imperial order by the US seeks to offer itself as a reference to stabilise and generalise a new mode of management, of building hegemony and political governance: that of reactionary authoritarianisms (Urbán, 2024) or electoral autocracies (Forti, 2025), which aspire to create the best possible conditions to find a way out of the secular stagnation that characterises global capitalism. This way out obviously involves imposing the logic of accumulation above many of the social and political conquests achieved from below and the biophysical limits of the planet.

Hence, Trump’s willingness to redefine a geopolitics favourable to the interests of his MAGA should be seen as the response to the end of happy globalisation—from which China has been the major beneficiary—through a protectionist and oligarchic ethno-nationalism that in turn is also making its way among the great powers on one side or the other. In the American case, this now leads him to radically question the foreign policy deployed since the fall of the Soviet bloc by successive US presidents, especially regarding the relationship with the old enemy from the East, to reformulate his empire.

Because, as Romaric Godin (2025) observes: “It is now about building a true empire, with a network of vassals who will come to consume its products, particularly its technological products, its oil or its liquefied gas (...) what is at stake today for a part of American capitalism is to avoid competition, that is, not a large transatlantic and transpacific market as in the neoliberal era, but an empire: a centre and peripheries where each has a role to play in its relationship with the centre.”

Within this framework, the rapprochement with a reactionary Russia nostalgic for its old Empire, manifested decisively through their recent joint vote in the UN Security Council regarding the Ukrainian “conflict”, is the most patent demonstration of the radical shift we are witnessing and in which both great powers agree to mutually respect the application of the old law of force in their respective spheres of influence. This is also reflected in their common contribution to the definitive crisis of legitimacy of the UN and so many other international institutions (such as UNRWA, UNESCO, WHO...) that have emerged since the end of the Second World War; or, what is even more serious, in the rejection of the moderate Paris Agreements on climate change.

Above this old international architecture lies the pursuit of a diplomacy self-interestedly termed “transactional” (in reality, subordinated to business as usual) through bilateral negotiations with different powers, as we are also seeing with the trade war. And, with it, the continuation of the global cultural war on the political-ideological plane through discursive Trumpism (Camargo, 2025), assumed by the reactionary International. This is now considered the only reliable ally in defending what they consider “more fundamental values” (i.e., white and Christian supremacy, patriarchal family and Islamophobia), threatened by “mass immigration” and the complicity of progressivism, as Vice President Vance denounced in his aforementioned speech during the Munich Security Conference.

And the European Union?

Amidst this radical change of scenario, the European Union appears as a regional bloc in decline and increasingly divided between, on the one hand, the option of closing ranks with the Washington sheriff, as Orban already does from Hungary, and, on the other, the search for “strategic autonomy” on the geopolitical, energy, economic, technological and defence fronts, as proposed by the Draghi Report. Those who defend this latter option, making a virtue of necessity, now seem willing to give absolute priority not only to defence spending for rearmament—even with Macron’s France offering to share its nuclear umbrella—but also to greater economic deregulation in the name of competitiveness, thus opening the door to a libertarian turn also from the top of the EU.[2] Along this path, it also seems evident that democracy, inequalities of all kinds and global warming will be affected, thus generating increased insecurity about the future among the working classes and the deepening of their internal divisions.

The commitment to strengthen a war economy has no justification because, moreover, as Mariana Mortagua has denounced, “EU countries together have more active personnel than the US and Russia, and the sum of their defence budgets is higher than Russia’s and closer to China’s”.[3] Added to this is the fact that, while the EU has shown its willingness to continue supporting Ukraine against the unjust invasion it is suffering from Russia, this attitude contrasts with its permanent complicity with the colonial State of Israel in the genocide it is committing against the Palestinian people and the rejection of their legitimate right to self-determination. It is, therefore, geopolitical interests in one case and the other, and not the defence of democracy against authoritarianism or illiberalism, that lie behind the practice of a double standard by the EU, as historian Ilan Pappé has rightly denounced recently.[4] Not even the outrageous project announced by Trump and Musk to turn Gaza into a “tourist paradise” has led to unanimous condemnation by the EU.

Therefore, we must not be deceived again about the idealisation of a Europe of welfare and democratic values when each passing day we are seeing the evolution of systemic parties and their adaptation to the far-right agenda in their security and racist policy, as we are witnessing with their migration policy and with the growing curtailment of fundamental rights and freedoms.

And the left?

In this general context, the European left faces enormous challenges that require more reasons than before to confront the ongoing reconfiguration of the old imperial order. The rejection of the new inter-imperialist pacts that Trump and Putin are trying to establish should be linked to firm opposition to an EU that only seeks to halt its decline as an imperialist bloc by claiming a better place in the new colonial division.

Even whilst being aware of the enormous weakness of the anti-capitalist left, it is urgent to regain strength in the heat of the new resistances that are emerging in different countries for the defence and extension of our rights and counterpowers. Along this path, we will have to articulate united socio-political fronts both for the common struggle against the different imperialisms and to respond to the threat represented by the reactionary authoritarianisms on the rise in our own countries. Tasks that should contribute to overflowing the framework of subordination to the lesser-evilism of the different versions of progressive neoliberalism, since these have amply demonstrated having developed policies that have not attacked the root of the structural factors that have facilitated the current reactionary acceleration.[5]

It is, therefore, about reformulating an intersectional, counter-hegemonic and ecosocialist strategy, closely linked to the struggle for the dissolution of NATO and solidarity with all peoples attacked in defence of the right to decide on their own future, against any interference or colonial predation of their resources, whether in Gaza or Ukraine. In this sense, faced with the possibility of a peace in Ukraine agreed between Trump and Putin, we must not desist in demanding—along with the resistant left in Ukraine and the anti-war opposition in Russia—the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from the occupied territory, the unconditional cancellation of the debt contracted since the beginning of the war (Toussaint, 2025) and the establishment of a just ecosocial reconstruction plan.[6]

Against all types of campism or national-state retreat, we have ahead the double and arduous task of continuing to bet on a demilitarised Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, closely associated with the search for a global and multidimensional security—the one that appeared as an existential necessity during the past pandemic crisis—against today’s dominant one, militaristic towards the exterior and punitive within our own countries.

Jaime Pastor is a political scientist and member of the viento sur editorial board