> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://redflag.org.au/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # US imperialism in the 21st century - URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/us-imperialism-in-the-21st-century/ - Published: 2026-10-21T04:41:28.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-21T05:07:05.000Z - Description: At the start of this century, US power was at its peak. Today it is weaker, the result of an imperial crisis in the Middle East, an economic crisis that crashed the world, the challenge from China and a political crisis that reflects and exacerbates these three trends. - Author: Tom Bramble At the start of this century, US imperialism was at its peak. It had been a decade since its chief adversary, the Soviet Union, had crumbled; the country was now the unchallenged global superpower. Washington was bringing countries into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that had been the USSR’s satellites in Europe, and it could rely on its allies to extend US influence into every corner of the world. The US dominated the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and was the most powerful nation in the United Nations. Its economy was booming, and the federal government ran surpluses. US multinationals found new markets and investment outlets worldwide. It was the heyday of “globalisation”. The US ruling class boasted that the country was a beacon to the world. As Democratic candidate Al Gore put it in one of the presidential debates in 2000: > “It is a great tribute to our founders that 224 years later this nation is now looked to by the peoples on every other continent and the peoples from every part of this Earth as a kind of model for what their future could be … The power of example is America’s greatest power in the world.” Twenty-five years later, US rulers are not so assured. The country has suffered a series of crises, and the global balance of power has shifted. The US remains the world’s leading power, but it is wracked by dysfunction on a series of fronts. Its allies are increasingly estranged. Wars in the Middle East have exposed its diminished military power. Its tech sector and banks still lead, but its industrial base is now much weaker. Its political system is seen not as a model for what to do, but what to avoid. The decay of US power can be understood as the result of four interrelated phenomena: an imperial crisis in the Middle East, an economic crisis that crashed the world, the challenge from China and a political crisis that reflects and exacerbates these three trends. ### **The imperial crisis** The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a devastating blow to America’s sense of invulnerability. But US strategists also recognised the attack as an opportunity to advance US power—justification for a new round of wars that would intimidate the country’s rivals and allies alike and overcome the Vietnam-era legacy of widespread domestic opposition to far-flung and lengthy land wars. The idea of an aggressive revival of US military interventionism had been germinating in the ranks of the Republican Party for some years in its “neoconservative” wing. The leading think tank was the Project for a New American Century, founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Its supporters and associates included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton, all of whom held senior positions in the George W. Bush administration, which had won the 2000 election. The October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was the first step in this wider project. Bush’s cabinet believed that the US would topple the ruling Taliban in Kabul and then lead a triumphal march through the capitals of its defeated enemies. Iraq, Iran and Syria were the main targets and, further afield, North Korea. Regime change was the objective. In the short term, the invasion of Afghanistan was a stunning success. The Taliban were overthrown within two months. Domestic support for the war was overwhelming. It seemed US imperialism was back. Next was Iraq. The Bush administration justified its invasion by associating the country’s president, Saddam Hussein, with the 9/11 attacks and claiming that he had built an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction to threaten the West. On 19 March 2003, the US and its allies invaded Iraq. Within three weeks, US forces had taken Baghdad, and on 1 May Bush appeared on the deck of the *USS Abraham Lincoln* to declare “mission accomplished”. Yet things turned bad for the US in both countries. In Iraq, local resistance to the occupation soon emerged. By the following year, it was raging. The US responded by flattening whole neighbourhoods, deploying white phosphorus and uranium-tipped weapons. Regular sweeps of suspected resistance activists terrified neighbourhoods and filled the jails. The US destroyed civilian infrastructure providing clean water, power and health care. And it sacked more than 100,000 government employees, creating mass unemployment and impoverishing millions. The death toll rose steadily. A study by the *Lancet* journal in 2006 estimated 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq in the first three years of the war. Anger towards the US ran white-hot. The US now turned to classic colonial divide-and-rule tactics, stoking sectarian conflict on religious lines. Tens of thousands of Iraqis died in a civil war the US occupation had provoked. Actual terrorist groups now began to grow in Iraq, including the group that became the Islamic State. The Bush administration dispatched 20,000 more US troops supposedly to quell internal conflict while promoting collaborators. It was all to no avail. Hatred of the occupation meant the US never “pacified” Iraq. In 2009, Britain pulled its troops out, and the US followed in 2011\. In 2014, the Obama administration sent troops back into Iraq to fight the Islamic State, but this was a rearguard operation. The US was eventually forced to shut its last base down on 30 September this year. American hubris had given way to humiliation. In Afghanistan, the US occupation also ran into the sand. The US propped up a corrupt government in Kabul that depended on warlords. Resistance soon appeared. In 2009, Democratic President Barack Obama ordered a 100,000-troop surge. The Taliban gradually regained territory based on popular hatred towards the predatory US-backed government. With war weariness widespread at home, the Trump administration in 2020 negotiated a withdrawal with the Taliban to take effect in 2021\. Once the US withdrew air support and contractors left, the Afghan army collapsed in a matter of days, and the Taliban took power once again. Bush’s dream of a victory parade through the region, a springboard for US global revival, had ground to a halt. At home, the cost of two decades of war and occupation—7,000 military personnel dead, US$3 trillion spent by the Pentagon and on care for veterans and interest payments on war borrowing—killed off any patriotic surge or any notion that the Vietnam Syndrome could be finally buried. For many American victims of domestic repression, the attacks on civil liberties and anti-Muslim racism spawned by the “War on Terror” could be added to the total cost. Such was popular revulsion at home that the next Republican to win the presidency after Bush, Donald Trump, won support in 2016 by pretending to be against war. The US’s war on Iran this year has only added to US military failures in the Middle East. Iran was one undisputed beneficiary of US defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, extending its influence on a range of fronts. The Trump administration, egged on by Israel, believed that years of sanctions, serious reversals among its allies and massive internal opposition had sufficiently weakened the government that a combined attack would quickly break the Islamist regime. But the US has failed in Iran so far. Trump’s regular proclamations of imminent victory are now treated as a joke. Despite not having landed a single Marine in Iran, the US armed forces are running out of munitions. The generals tell Trump the war is unwinnable. Arab allies see that US promises of protection have amounted to nothing. The operation is also stoking inflation in the US. The US is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a war with no path to victory. The US military has demonstrated that it can pulverise humans and essential infrastructure but cannot extract strategic gains from its bloody wars. ### **Economic crisis** For all the boasting about America’s economic power at the turn of the century, the US soon suffered two heavy blows. The first was the dot-com bust. The explosion of US tech corporations in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was held up by boosters of American capitalism as vindication of the country’s strength. The Nasdaq stock market index tracking the industry rose fivefold from 1996 to its March 2000 peak. But by October 2002, the Nasdaq had lost more than three-quarters of its value, dragged down by rising interest rates, doubts that the dot-com businesses would ever show a profit and an end to the supply of easy venture capital. Major businesses collapsed under heavy debt. Enron, an energy trading business and among the country’s largest companies, went bust. The media, which had praised these companies for years, were now forced to expose their corrupt dealings. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs, while most executives cashed out and walked away scot-free. The global financial crisis of 2008–09 was even more severe. It started in the US housing industry, then spread to the US stock and credit markets, triggering the biggest economic bust since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In eighteen months, trillions of dollars of wealth were destroyed. Household-name banks went under. The crisis dragged down the entire global economy. Whole regions of world capitalism teetered on the brink of collapse. Of course, the suffering was not shared equally. The working class was shafted with job losses, wage cuts, evictions and savage austerity. Unemployment did not fall back to its pre-crisis level until 2016\. Many corporations, however, received enormous government subsidies and cheap loans. The recovery was slow by historical standards, GDP rising by just 2 percent annually over the decade that followed. The US economy has never recovered the production lost during this period. The US is currently faring relatively well compared to other advanced economies: a huge investment boom is under way, centred on tech companies, unemployment has fallen and corporate and household debt are down. But weaknesses lie beneath the surface, and the scars of the ten-year crisis are still visible. Federal debt has grown over the years as the government responded to the dot-com bust, the financial crisis and the pandemic by throwing trillions of dollars in subsidies to the capitalists. Successive tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy have added to the debt, as has spending on wars and war preparations. The federal government is now running budget deficits of 6 percent of GDP, unprecedented outside deep crises. The successive crises encouraged the US central bank to keep interest rates low. This contributed to a long bull market in equities that benefited wealthy investors and exacerbated already high inequality. Since 2022, however, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates sharply. This has not yet burst the stock market bubble, but it has increased interest payments on government debt and on companies now feverishly borrowing to invest in AI infrastructure. Annual federal interest payments now stand at nearly $1 trillion, the second-largest item on the government’s books after Social Security. Rising bond yields in turn drive up interest rates on home loans and consumer debt, hitting working-class living standards. The US economy may not be in crisis yet, but the fault lines are obvious. ### **The China shock** The China shock added to US troubles. At the time of Bush’s inauguration, the US regarded China as a potential rival but not a serious threat. China’s GDP was just one-eighth the size of America’s, and it had little ability to project power beyond its shores. Far from a threat, US imperialism saw China’s rise as an opportunity. Washington calculated that US capitalists could use China as a low-wage manufacturing platform and market and, on that basis, sponsored China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001. US plans in China soon came unstuck. China grew rapidly; by 2011, its economy was half the size of the US’s. China adopted US methods and techniques to develop its own capitalist enterprises, which soon challenged the US in its domestic and export markets. China began to exert a magnetic pull on its trading partners, which increasingly looked to it for new economic opportunities. In response, the Obama administration announced a “pivot to Asia” in 2012\. Sixty percent of US naval power was to be directed to East Asia and the Pacific, and the Middle East was downgraded as the main theatre for US imperialism. In 2017, the incoming Trump administration ratcheted up the US offensive against China. Trade policies are always a weapon. Previous presidents had promoted “free trade” to advance US interests. Trump argued that this had only enriched China at the US’s expense; a high tariff wall was the only way to “Make America Great Again”. In the alternating Trump-Biden-Trump presidencies, different economic and diplomatic strategies have been pursued, but the common theme has been the desire to hold China at bay. These attempts have failed. China’s GDP is now two-thirds of US GDP. It produces 30 percent of global manufacturing, nearly double the US share. China now dominates global production across a range of high-tech and advanced manufacturing; its universities lead the world in science and tech research; and Chinese labs are catching up to the US’s expensive AI frontier models despite the US’s strenuous efforts to block them. Crucially for US imperialism, Chinese industrial capacity is powering a growing military presence that reaches hundreds of kilometres from its shores. China now has more ships than the US Navy, and its shipyards can build them much faster. US attempts to “reshore” manufacturing for military purposes have had extremely limited success. The Chinese ruling class now believes that it can go toe to toe with the US. The latter’s relative decline and its failed wars in the Middle East have also encouraged Russia to test US resolve in Ukraine. The turn-of-the-century unipolar moment has given way to a multipolar world. All talk of a “new American century” has receded. ### **Political paralysis** Imperialist failure abroad, the failures of American capitalism at home, and the China shock have shaken American politics. At the turn of the century, more than 40 percent of respondents to Gallup polling said that they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in US institutions. Today, the figure is just above a quarter. On the left, young people in particular were drawn to anti-capitalist politics, fuelling the Bernie Sanders surge in 2015\. But most of the radicalisation has been expressed on the right. The ruling class proved incapable of stopping Donald Trump’s rise; he transformed the Republicans into a party of radical disruption and chaos. It speaks volumes about the state of official politics that the federal government of the world’s most important imperial power is run by con artists, grifters and anti-science nutters. Trump is attacking America’s traditional allies, one of the country’s major sources of strength, antagonising the military and foreign policy establishment, and blatantly using executive power to go after his critics and reward fealty. His budget policies are unashamedly pro-billionaire, but many of his economic policies appear little more than thought bubbles. Trump’s tariffs and the broader program of economic nationalism do, however, have one important goal for US imperialism: to unwind the offshoring of US manufacturing and rebuild production at home, preparing for war with China. That has been a consistent theme of both Trump’s and Biden’s terms in office. Trade and economic policy are now squarely aimed at winning the competition between the superpowers. The problem for US imperialism is that Trump’s administration is so chaotic and unpredictable, and the manufacturing base so degraded, that it may be very difficult for it to be rebuilt, short of actual war breaking out when the Pentagon will simply take over the industrial base, as it did in World War Two. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bush’s rhetoric focused on the need for the country to stand as one against a common enemy. For the Trump administration, the enemy is at home—critics of the administration and progressives more generally. Any idea of “national consensus” has gone, except perhaps in one area: Trump has the lowest favourability rating of any president since polling began. The US may still be the world’s number-one imperial power, but compared to the turn of the century, it has declined and appears less confident and more divided. The ruling class has no strategy to stop China’s ongoing economic rise, or to lift the living standards of its own working class. It seems incapable of providing a credible narrative justifying its own economic excesses or its ongoing and obscene levels of military spending. But that doesn’t mean the story is over. This is a wounded beast, and wounded beasts can lash out in many directions.