https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/28/ignore-the-bluster-donald-trump-is-not-an-imperialist/
US president Donald Trump’s MAGA brand of foreign policy has been treated with contempt and consternation by much of the world. He has incited the ire of neoliberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, as well as many European intellectuals, who rarely have much positive to say about America anyway. To them, Trump epitomises a destructive American arrogance and imperial delusions.
Whatever he may think of himself, Donald Trump is no Augustan figure, no colossus ready to conquer the known world. He is a phenomenon borne of concern about American decline, ranging from failing education levels and massive debt to frayed national coherence and fading industrial, even military, supremacy. He is driven not by imperial ambitions (despite his absurd claims about acquiring Greenland and Canada), but rather in response to the consequences of recent imperial overreach.
The old US foreign policy, argues secretary of state Marco Rubio, is ‘obsolete’. Attempts to reshape the world through unrestrained globalisation and foreign interventions have not only failed, he says, but are now also a ‘weapon being used against us’.
Even the name of Trump’s movement, MAGA, says it all. Make America Great Again implies that it is not so great now. Trump’s promised ‘golden age’, if it arrives at all, will be forged in a new mercantilist era that has been gradually embraced as well in Europe and supercharged by China’s drive to world preeminence.
Right now, America looks dominant largely because its traditional competitors – like the UK, Japan and the EU – are all suffering markedly worse economic and demographic crises. By 2050, the populations of Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Spain are all expected to drop significantly. Even China suffers from a diminishing workforce, an overreliance on manufactured exports, mass alienation among the young and educated, a massive real-estate collapse and capital flight.
However, other nations’ problems do not make America less vulnerable. The US’s own population growth has also slowed, and recent economic trends have mostly benefitted the affluent and those working for the government. The top 10 per cent of all earners now account for half of all spending. This is well above the roughly one-third of three decades ago. Partially this comes as many of the companies historically tied to high wages – US Steel, General Motors, RCA, Xerox, Intel and Boeing – have either disappeared or markedly declined.
Wall Street seems more concerned with making money from China than boosting the American economy. As American Prospect correctly points out, American investors are effectively funding China’s bid to displace the US as the world’s reigning superpower. America’s inability to build things – most notably commercial and military vessels – means that, even in terms of defence, its power is waning.
Trump came to office in large part in reaction to the abandonment of the national interest by the corporate and financial elites. According to one study, the growing trade deficit between the US and China cost us roughly 3.7million American jobs between 2001 and 2018. It was partially because of this abandonment of the working class by the global liberalised economy that Trump was able to win voters in once solidly Democratic industrial states, first in 2016 and then again last year.
Trump’s drive for tariffs makes sense in this light, particularly if the focus is to hurt the EU, where tariffs on US-made cars are four times higher than in the opposite direction. This is also often the case in such things as food, beverages and other agricultural products.
President Trump has called the EU’s trade policies an ‘atrocity’, as he attempts, however clumsily, to get America’s key trade partners to reduce their historically high protective barriers. His threats have also led some manufacturers to scrap plans to move production abroad. Honda has decided not to shift its production of new models to Mexico and has instead opted for Indiana. Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and chipmaker TSMC have also been persuaded to invest billions to build new production sites in the US.
