National-Imperialism: Trump and the Return of an Older Playbook
By Juliane Furno
The previous note in this series, “Who Can Still Steer?”, argued that the erosion of state mediating capacity across the periphery is not merely a domestic story: it is driven from outside, by an imperialist offensive that deepens the bonds of dependency precisely as the hegemonic project enters its own decline. That offensive is the subject Juliane Furno takes up here. Where our note measured the capacity a state retains to act on its position, this piece reconstructs the external force that has been wearing that capacity down, and reads the present phase of U.S. imperialism against the longer history of how the American state was built.
The systematic attacks carried out by the United States against international law and the institutions created after the Second World War have placed the question of imperialism back on the agenda.
Imperialism has neither ended nor weakened by taking on its current “colony-free” form. As Ellen Wood (2003) argues, the relative absence of territorial occupation that prevails today does not signal the end of imperialism but, precisely, the emergence of the most advanced form of specifically capitalist imperialism. Where, in the still-developing period of capitalism, imperialism relied heavily on extra-economic forms of exploitation, in the present period, that of capitalist maturity, the mechanisms proper to the market have become far more prominent than extra-economic coercion. This neither limits nor weakens imperialism; it merely recasts it in a context of capitalist maturity.
The performance staged today by Donald Trump at the head of the U.S. government appears to be a blend of these two principal historical forms of imperialist action. On one side, there is a reinforcement of domination through typically market-based forms, above all through U.S. control of the international reserve currency and the international payments system. Sanctions and the extraterritorial reach of the dollar and of finance are being intensified, together with control over strategic supply chains (chips, energy, critical minerals) and regimes of export controls and trade barriers deployed to reorganize dependencies and determine who has access to technology, credit, and markets. Rather than occupying territory, power now appears as the capacity to switch flows of investment, technology, data, and payment networks on and off, imposing significant obstacles and economic costs not only on rivals but on partners as well, whenever it suits.
On the other side, Trump appears to reintroduce, with greater prominence, the classic instruments of the formative period of the imperialist nation-states. The return to industrial protectionism, threats of a neocolonial character, and military incursion are all part of this package. The imperialism of the Trump era has no qualms about announcing what it has come for, and it lays bare the tightly interwoven relationship between the interests of the American state and those of its national firms.
The insignia that sustained the imperialist actions of the recent past, above all the demagogic “democratic question,” no longer suffice to justify military ventures. The clearest proof of the decline of North American imperialism is that its domination is increasingly secured through coercion and less through consent. And yet the more threatened North American imperialism becomes, the more ferocious it grows. So it was in the 1970s, when U.S. hegemony was contested on economic, military, and monetary terrain. The response that restored American hegemony, grasped with great clarity by the Brazilian economist Maria da Conceição Tavares, was the diplomacy of the strong dollar and the diplomacy of arms: sponsoring an arms race to outstrip Soviet efforts and raising the base interest rate of the U.S. Treasury, thereby reaffirming the centrality of the dollar and of the Wall Street–based financial system.
The United States appears to stand before the redefinition of a “national-imperialism,” with characteristics closer to the interwar period than to what arose after the Second World War, which saw the emergence of what Samir Amin (2005) called “collective imperialism,” with the United States occupying the leading position and counting on Western Europe and Japan as its junior partners.
That arrangement appears to have come undone. The most recent U.S. actions have been taken in defiance of international law, over the objections of UN resolutions and its moribund Security Council, and in disagreement with its own historic allies. Europe has gone from being an old subordinate ally to an economic burden that the United States is no longer willing to sustain. This explains, among other things, the hollowing-out of NATO. The keynote is a U.S. administration more committed to domestic American interests and less disposed to shoulder the dilemmas of military protection for its former front-line allies.
I therefore contend that the actions of American imperialism today are much closer to the precepts that shaped the construction of the American state up to the 1940s than to the imperialist form that originated after the Second World War. The method of strengthening the American economy through a tariff system lies at the origin of the modern American state, which made ample use of tariffs to develop its industrial sector, with the internal market at its center. That economic nationalism, present in the “American System,” combined tariff protection, public works, expansion of the domestic market, and the construction of the country’s own productive capacities—much of which finds clear echoes in the present scenario.
At the end of the First World War, President Wilson presented a document containing fourteen points, a proposal for a global reordering that sought to replace the old European diplomacy—based on secret alliances, the balance of power, and recurrent war—with a liberal-multilateral order founded on rules, self-determination, and economic openness. The paradox is that the United States itself ended up not joining the League of Nations, which was the product of that same Democratic president’s own proposals. Congress refused to participate, holding it more advantageous to preserve unilateral freedom of action than to submit the rising power to a collective organization. Once again, very similar to what we are living through today.
This new scenario of a return to American isolationism is in keeping with the idea of “flexible realism,” set out in the new U.S. National Security Strategy, where it is made explicit that domestic national interests take precedence over all others—hence the roundabout offensive over Venezuela’s oil reserves and Greenland’s rare earths, to name only two examples.
Trump’s national-imperialism is also a product of the contradictions internal to the American balance of forces. There are two major blocs supporting the Trump government, with external and internal interests of distinct orders. On one side is the group led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, committed to suffocating socialist or revolutionary experiences in Latin America, Cuba and Venezuela above all. This group presses for more forceful action abroad, betting on the direct military and diplomatic involvement of the United States in the rest of the world. On the other side is the group synthesized by MAGA (Make America Great Again), which demands the retrenchment of U.S. presence and spending on foreign military ventures, mobilizing a political agenda aimed at resolving the vast and accumulated problems at home.
The national-imperialism and its doctrine of “peace through strength” thus become the preferred instrument for pushing Washington’s agenda forward. Left behind are the attempts to seduce and capture multilateral bodies, along with the discourse of the “rules-based system,” so often invoked in convenient and selective fashion. American imperialism is no longer concerned with keeping up appearances, and it wagers on its material superiority and the direct use of its power to redraw the international order. To contest it, others will have to demonstrate equivalent strength. In this movement, the United States is also reorganizing its influence across the American continent: interfering in electoral processes in Argentina and Honduras; pressuring Colombia and Mexico with the prospect of anti-narcotics operations on their territories; driving Cuba toward economic asphyxiation and demanding an agreement “before it is too late”; expanding its military presence in Ecuador, in Panama (with the intention of reinforcing control over the Canal), and in Haiti (defending, at the UN, a “force” aimed at suppressing gangs); and, most recently, issuing an ultimatum to Denmark and other NATO allies to hand over control of Greenland or else, they declare, they will take it “by force” (Ron, 2026).
Juliane Furno is a professor at the Faculty of Economics of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and a researcher at the Political Economy Department at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
References
Amin, S. (2005). O imperialismo, passado e presente. Tempo, 9(18), 77–123. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1413-77042005000100005
Furno, J. (2022). Imperialismo: uma introdução econômica. Rio de Janeiro: Da Vinci Livros.
Ron, C. (2026). Três lições do efeito Trump, 2 tarefas para o futuro e 1 mensagem de Bolívar. Boletim Nuestra América. Instituto Tricontinental de Pesquisa Social. https://thetricontinental.org/pt-pt/boletim-na-corolario-trump-bolivar/
Tavares, M. C. (1985). A retomada da hegemonia norte-americana. Revista de Economia Política / Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, 5(2), 157–167. https://doi.org/10.1590/0101-31571985-2005
Wood, E. M. (2003). Empire of Capital. London/New York: Verso.