First, Donald Trump is a seriously dysfunctional individual whose self-aggrandizement, intense hubris, and lack of human empathy is obvious to all reasonable people. His public statements and his zigzags on policy (tariffs, international conflicts, and all sorts of cultural and social issues) demonstrate that. But there is method in this madness. Trump’s strategy aims at restoring the United States’s manufacturing base, reducing the trade deficit in goods, and reasserting US global hegemony, particularly against China.

Trump and his MAGA acolytes are convinced that the United States has been robbed of its economic power and hegemonic status by other major economies stealing their manufacturing base and then imposing all sorts of blockages on the ability of American corporations (particularly manufacturing companies) to rule the roost. For Trump, this is expressed in the overall trade deficit that the United States runs with the rest of the world.

Donald Trump often refers to US president William McKinley when announcing his tariffs. In 1890, McKinley, then a member of the House of Representatives, proposed a range of tariffs to protect American industry that were subsequently adopted by Congress. But the tariff measures did not work out well. They did not avoid the severe depression that began in 1893 and lasted until 1897. In 1896, McKinley became president and presided over a new set of tariffs, the Dingley Tariff Act of 1897. As this was a boom period, McKinley claimed that the tariffs would help to boost the economy. Called the “Napoleon of Protection”, he linked his tariffs policy to the military takeover of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines to extend America’s “sphere of influence,” something Trump echoes today with his comments about Canada, Greenland, or Gaza. Early into this second term as president, McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist who had been enraged by the suffering of farm workers during the recession of 1893–97, which he blamed on McKinley.

Now we have another “Napoleon of Protection” in Trump, who claims his tariffs will help American manufacturers. Trump’s aim is clear: he wants to restore America’s manufacturing base. Much of the imports coming into the United States from countries like China, Vietnam, Europe, Canada, Mexico, etc., are from US companies selling products back to the United States at lower cost than if they were produced within the country. Over the last forty years of “globalization,” multinational companies in the United States, Europe, and Japan moved their manufacturing operations into the Global South to take advantage of cheap labor costs, the absence of trade unions or regulations, and access to the latest technology. But these countries in Asia dramatically industrialized their economies as a result and thus gained market share in manufacturing and exports, leaving the United States to fall back on marketing, finance, and services.

Does that matter? Trump and his crew think so. Their eventual strategic aim is to weaken, strangle, and pull off “regime change” in China, while also taking full hegemonic control over Latin America and the Pacific. So, US manufacturing must be restored at home. Joe Biden was keen to do that through an “industrial policy” that subsidized tech companies and manufacturing infrastructure, but that meant a huge rise in government spending that in turn drove up the fiscal deficit to record levels. Trump reckons that imposing tariffs to force American manufacturing companies to return home and foreign companies to invest in America is a better way. He reckons that he can boost manufacturing, spend more on arms and reduce taxes for corporations while cutting back on social spending and so keep the government budget and the dollar stable — all through tariff hikes.

This will not end well. In the 1930s, the attempt of the United States to “protect” its industrial base with the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs only led to a further contraction in output as the Great Depression enveloped North America, Europe, and Japan. Big business and its economists condemned the Smoot-Hawley measures and campaigned vociferously against them. Henry Ford tried to convince the then president Herbert Hoover to veto the measures, calling them “economic stupidity.” Similar words are now coming from the voice of big business and finance, the Wall Street Journal, which called Trump’s tariffs “the dumbest trade war in history.” The Great Depression of the 1930s was not caused by the protectionist trade war that the United States provoked in 1930, but the tariffs added force to the global contraction as it became “every country for itself.” Between the years 1929 and 1934, global trade fell by approximately 66 percent as countries worldwide implemented retaliatory trade measures.

While Trump has broken with the neoliberal policies of “globalization” and free trade in order to “make America great again” at the expense of the rest of the world, he has not dropped neoliberalism for the domestic economy. Taxes will be cut for big business and the rich, but also the aim will be to reduce the federal government debt and cut public spending (except for arms, of course). This year, the US budget deficit will be almost $2 trillion, of which more than half is net interest — about as much as America spends on its military. Total outstanding government debt now stands at over $30 trillion or 100 percent of GDP. America’s debt as a percentage of GDP will soon exceed its World War II peak. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2034, US governmental debt will exceed $50 trillion — 122.4 per cent of GDP. The US will be spending $1.7 trillion a year on interest alone.

To avoid this scenario, Trump aims to “privatize” as much government as he can. “We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management’s said. As Trump sees it, the public sector is unproductive, but not the finance sector, of course. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” These “great jobs” were not identified, however. Moreover, if the private sector stops growing as the trade war intensifies, those higher productivity jobs may not materialize anyway.

Trump’s proclaimed policy of restoring US manufacturing is based on the idea that protecting domestic industry from foreign competition will revitalize American capitalism. The irony is that the United States runs a sizeable trade surplus in services like finance, media, business professions, software development, etc. So, the trade deficit in manufacturing goods is compensated somewhat by services exports.

Applying tariffs to goods imports further undermines the ability of US manufacturing and services to grow, because it increases the cost of components going into final production. That will either drive up prices if these costs are passed on or reduce profitability if not — or both.

The contradictions in Trump’s tariffs and deportations were graphically revealed in the recent arrest and removal of over five hundred Korean technicians working at a Hyundai car battery project in Georgia. Trump wants foreign companies to invest for jobs in the United States but then arrests foreign construction workers. He argues that revenues from the tariff increases will help reduce federal government deficits and debt, but the increased revenue is tiny compared to the reductions in revenue from the tax cuts for corporations and the richest Americans in his “Big Beautiful Bill.” Trump has sometimes reversed or reduced his tariff hikes when financial markets responded negatively, but the financial sector appears increasingly sanguine about Trump’s measures. So, for now, he will persist.

The major capitalist economies have all experienced a much slower pace of economic growth since the global financial crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. The US economy has done the best, but real GDP growth there has averaged no more than 2 percent a year in the last seventeen years, compared to over 3 percent a year before 2008. The other so-called G7 economies have performed worse; their average real GDP growth rate has been 1 percent a year at best. Germany, France, and the UK are stagnating, while Japan, Canada, and Italy are doing only marginally better.

These stagnating national outputs are due to slowing rates in productive investments as capital’s average profitability globally approaches historic lows. How can the latter be the case when we know the mega tech giants, energy, and big pharma in the United States are making huge profits? These companies are the exception to the rule, compared to vast swathes of businesses in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Indeed, some 20–30 percent of companies globally do not make enough profit to service their debts and are forced to borrow more to survive. As a result, so far this century, profits have been increasingly invested not in innovation and technology, but in property and financial speculation. Wall Street booms while Main Street struggles.

Neoliberal policies were based on US hegemony. Internationally, it was always a disguise for what used to be called the Washington Consensus, namely that the United States and its junior partners in Europe and Asia-Pacific would decide the rules on free trade and capital flows in the interests of the banks and multinationals of the so-called Global North. Trump has changed all that. Now the US government goes it alone, not only at the expense of the poor countries of the so-called Global South, but also of its junior partners in the US-led “alliance.”

The Trumpist state also now intervenes in the US economy and social structure. The public sector and many of its agencies have been decimated. Trump even seeks to take control of the Federal Reserve. He rules by decree, bypassing Congress and ignoring the courts. Free trade has been replaced by protection; and immigration has been replaced by deportation. Still, under Trump, neoliberalism — in the sense of the deregulation of environment controls, health safeguards, financial risk and cuts in public spending and taxes for the rich — continues.

The leaders of the major EU countries have engaged in self-harm. The global financial crash of 2008 led to a huge debt burden for the weaker EU countries. They imposed draconian austerity measures on their people to meet the demands of the banks and the EU institutions: the ECB and the EU Commission. Growth rates in labor productivity, investment, and real incomes in the major economies slowed sharply and the major economies in Europe (including the UK) failed to keep up with the latest technological advances.

And then came the war in Ukraine. The policy of sanctions against Russia and the ending of Russian oil and gas imports drove up energy prices to record levels. That cut off the legs of German and core European manufacturing. Germany quickly dropped from the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe into stagnation and slump, now for three years in a row. France and Italy did little better, and the British economy is clearly broken, with little sign of any revival.

To compound this, Europe’s leaders have become obsessed with claiming that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is about to invade Europe and “end democracy”. Whether they really believe this is difficult to say, but their solution is to demand that the US military stay in Europe. EU leaders are also applying sanctions and tariffs on Chinese goods at the United States’s bequest, further illustrating their craven subservience as vassal states to Washington.

Meanwhile, Europe’s government spending has seen sharp rises in military expenditure — more than doubling the share of GDP before the end of this decade — at the expense of productive investment, climate measures, public services and welfare. No wonder the forces of reaction are fast gaining strength with their racist, anti-immigrant, climate-skeptical, and “free market” policies in nearly every European state. Given this environment, and the fact that there is no sign of change in the EU’s trajectory, Europe’s relative decline can only accelerate. France’s Charles de Gaulle, Germany’s Helmut Kohl, and even Britain’s Margaret Thatcher must be turning in their graves.

Trump sees himself as a “dealmaker” par excellence. And in dealmaking, agreed rules and regulations are just something in the way. As he sees it, he can sort out international trade deals in the interests of the United States via direct negotiation with the leaders of Europe, Japan, etc. He can end the wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia by direct bargaining, using incentives and threats. This is Trump’s approach to everything.

But beneath his tantrums lies a rational belief that the United States is fast losing its global hegemonic role. Seen in historical perspective, this signals a shift in the global order. Yes, we now have a multipolar world not seen since the 1930s. After 1945, a bipolar world order developed in which US imperialism ruled the world but faced an ideological opposite, the Soviet Union. US imperialism eventually won that “Cold War” with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites in Europe. From then, it was Pax Americana, but with little actual peace as the United States continued to wage invasions and interventions to police the world in its interests and those of its junior partners in crime in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and East Asia.

But no good thing can last forever, and American capitalism has now entered a period of irreversible decline. US manufacturing and exports lost their predominance in world markets, first to Europe in the 1960s, then Japan in the 1970s, but decisively to China in the twenty-first century. That said, we should not exaggerate the relative decline of US hegemony. The United States still has the largest and most penetrative financial sector in the world. Its stock of foreign assets is far higher than any other country. The dollar remains the main currency for trade, capital flows, and national foreign exchange reserves. And the US military is still all-powerful, with over seven hundred bases around the world and a budget larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world put together. Its partners in crime are desperate to stay under the US protective wing in order to preserve “liberal democracy,” meaning the interests of their capitalist elites.

But there are now significant recalcitrant powers that are not playing by US rules. Some of them, like Russia, originally wanted to join the West — Russia was even a member of the so-called G8 for a while. India is part of the Quad-4, a US-led body designed to mitigate China’s rise in Asia. When the Iranian people overthrew the corrupt and vicious Shah in 1979, even the mullahs looked to reach a compromise with the United States and the West. Post-apartheid South Africa was also keen to join the democratic West, despite decades of support for oppressive apartheid governments by the United States and its allies. But all the members of what is now called the BRICS were rebuffed by the US-led alliance. The so-called Washington Consensus, the ideological platform of successive US governments, instead aimed at regime change in Russia, Iran, and, above all, China. The die was cast for a multipolar world.

Still, the BRICS do not amount to a coherent alternative to US dominance. That means the idea of a multipolar world replacing US hegemony is premature. Sure, Pax Americana as existed after World War II and again after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990s no longer operates. But the so-called BRICS is a diverse and loose formation of regional powers based in the most populated and often poorest countries of the world, with few common interests. It is not the BRICS as such that are the threat to US dominance, but rather the rising economic power of China — potentially a much more powerful and resistant foe than the Soviet Union ever was.

The “Left” as you describe it is what I would call the reformist, liberal, or social-democratic left. This left starts from the premise that there is no alternative to the capitalist system, because any idea of socialism has long faded into the background. The job of this left, as they see it, is to make capitalism work more fairly for the majority, but without damaging significantly the interests of capital, because that would kill the goose that lays the eggs. This left has lost traction, because the capitalist goose is no longer laying enough eggs for all and increasingly only producing them for the ruling minority.

The liberal left used to laud the success of globalization and free trade in the period of the Great Moderation from the 1990s onward. The global financial crash and the Great Recession, followed by the Long Depression of the 2010s, the devastating pandemic slump of 2020, the ensuing inflationary spiral in the cost of living — all this has exposed the failure of capitalism to meet the social needs of the majority in America, Europe, and across the globe in the twenty-first century.

Liberalism and gradual reform, once successfully espoused by the liberal left, has been discredited everywhere. It has been replaced by popular support for a crude nationalism in the form of anti–big business, anti-immigrant racism spreading across America and Europe (e.g., 70 percent of the people held in America’s ICE detention centers had no criminal convictions, and many of those that did have criminal records only committed minor offences, like traffic violations). Trump and his MAGA supporters, Farage in the UK, and other similar groups across Europe represent a move toward the dark years of 1930s fascism that eventually led to a terrible world war. To combat this, the real left instead must start from the premise that the capitalist system, now dominant globally, is irreversibly in crisis.

Can the BRICS be a decisive alternative force to US-led imperialism with its ever-ambitious NATO alliance? I don’t think so. Economically, the BRICS and even BRICS+, including Indonesia, Egypt and possibly Saudi Arabia is a loose grouping, in which China is the dominant economy. The others are relatively weak or overly dependent on one sector, usually energy and raw materials.

The financial pull of the BRICS with its New Development Bank is weak compared to the agencies of Western capital. Politically, the leaders of the BRICS grouping have diverse interests and ideologies. Russia is a crony autocracy. Iran is run by an Islamic religious elite. China, despite its phenomenal economic success, has one-party rule. India is governed by an ex-fascist Hindu nationalist party that suppresses any dissent. These are not governments that stand for internationalism or for workers’ democracy. Within these countries, there is no room for maneuver, as you put it. What is required is the removal of these regimes by workers’ movements to establish genuine socialist democracies that will lead international change.

The emergence of multipolarity in the twenty-first century is a consequence of the relative decline of US capitalism, especially since the global financial crash and the ensuing Great Recession. But it is a dangerous illusion to imagine that the resistant powers are a force for internationalism, that they will achieve a reduction in inequality and poverty globally, or stop global warming and impending environmental disaster. We need an international of socialist governments for that. If a socialist government came to power in a major economy, that would open up space for other countries to resist imperialism. A socialist government could work with countries outside US control, such as Venezuela or Cuba, which today have very limited options. But most importantly, it would also inspire the movement for democratic socialist governments across the globe.