Everything must burn! | Tomasz Konicz

By Tomasz Konicz / March 15, 2025

A brief overview of the crisis-driven dismantling of the remnants of American hegemony by the Trump administration.

Greenland and Panama, Mexico and Canada — plus some Gaza beaches and Boers from South Africa. The first weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency were downright surreal in terms of foreign policy, even beyond the transatlantic rifts. Much of the White House’s declarations and concrete foreign policy in the winter of 2025 felt like a bad dream — something that simply could not be real. A freak show put on by deranged terror clowns. The only positive aspect of this nightmare is that it makes it impossible for the bourgeois press to normalise Trump’s presidency — despite the best efforts of leading German media outlets in particular [1].

Link: https://medium.com/@ascentreact/everything-must-burn-862b983914a6

At times, Trump’s initial foreign policy moves seemed downright insane, completely detached from the established paths of US geopolitics. It often seemed as if Trump was not following any economic or geopolitical interests, as if he was consciously working to destroy the old hegemonic alliances and structures that the US had established after World War II. Everything must burn [2] — this seems to be Trump’s motto. The man who set out to make America great again is, in reality, acting as the gravedigger of US hegemony.

And yet, there is often a method to the madness. If one were to sum up Trump’s geopolitics in a single phrase, it would be the attempt to pursue power politics in a crisis without acknowledging the existence of the crisis. This is what it looks like when capitalist functional elites come to terms with the fact that capitalism, in its current form, can no longer be sustained — and seek refuge in a fascist crisis imperialism [3]. The isolationism Trump preached during his campaign was quickly replaced by an almost archaic imperialism — similar to that practiced by Putin’s Russia.

Empire building from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego

This is evident in Trump’s infantile declaration of his desire to annex Greenland — if necessary, through military force. What seems like the omnipotent fantasy of a toddler pointing at a large island on a globe, now equipped with the means to take possession of it, becomes at least somewhat understandable in the context of the escalating capitalist climate crisis. Trump, an almost fanatical climate change denier, implicitly acknowledges the existence of the climate crisis — though only in the form of a crisis-imperialist land grab.

The melting Arctic ice sheets and thawing permafrost are opening up new strategic shipping routes and exposing the resources of this still largely undeveloped region of the world — which has triggered a corresponding crisis-imperialist race for the Arctic between the neighbouring states [4]. It is therefore not just about Greenland, but about territorial claims in the region, where Russia currently has the best cards. While the US has Alaska, the Kremlin controls the old Soviet infrastructure in northern Siberia and the largest territorial connection to the Arctic, granting it a massive exclusive economic zone beneath the rapidly melting ice sheet.

Greenland would substantially improve Washington’s position in the crisis-imperialist rat race for Arctic resources — and, why not, Canada as the second major Arctic coastal state. Even if Trump’s military threats against its northern neighbour remain imperialist rhetoric, Washington’s ambition to bind Canada as closely as possible to the US is entirely realistic. The United States is Canada’s most important trading partner, so Trump does indeed have multiple levels of power at his disposal to force a northern expansion process on a geopolitical and economic level.

In addition to naked brutal extractivism, the effort to control as many energy sources and natural resources as possible, Washington under Trump seems to be striving to restore its dominance over the whole of America — in the spirit of the old Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and during the Cold War.

The introduction of punitive tariffs against Canada was accompanied by similar escalatory measures toward Mexico — though the White House is pursuing a different objective with its southern neighbour. Canada is to be incorporated into the US, ideally annexed, also in order to increase its socio-economic potential in the struggle for dominance against China. Meanwhile, Mexico is primarily pressured in terms of exclusion — sealing itself off from the misery of the collapsing regions of the periphery. The drive to seal off the centres, to permanently build walls, is a defining feature of the crisis imperialism that is becoming more and more entrenched, [5] which only recognises the periphery as a resource depository in the context of extractivism.

The southern border is meant to be impassable for people, but the potential for blackmail by the US against Mexico has grown in recent years precisely because of the increasing cross-border movement of commodities. The Biden administration has already paved the way for deglobalisation to a certain extent by turning Mexico into an extended manufacturing base for the US to reduce Chinese overseas imports. This so-called nearshoring strategy [6] created the dependencies that Trump can now use to force Mexico to make sweeping concessions. The Central American country is deploying army units of around 10,000 troops to the border to deter migrants and avert the threatened tariffs that would devastate Mexico’s young export industry.

Trump appears intent on replacing the crumbling US hegemonic system — which relied on global US standards, institutions, regulatory frameworks, and economic incentives for allied powers — with an American empire stretching from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, built on military-based dominance and coercive measures. Direct control over resources and strategic trade routes, protectionism and domestic reindustrialisation, sealing off the southern border against the impending chaos of the crisis, military dominance and imperial ambition instead of the old US hegemony within the Western alliance system — these contours of a US crisis-imperialism seem to be taking shape in the early months of the Trump administration, despite all the chaos. A US empire is to replace the Western global world order that Washington largely shaped after World War II.

The Trumpian impulse towards American empire-building is, in reality, directed less against Europe and more against China and its growing influence in the Americas south of the Rio Grande. And at least in the short term, particularly in relation to the periphery and semi-periphery, this strategy could indeed prove successful. The economic and social disparities are simply too vast: Mexico must enforce Trump’s isolationist mania in order to protect its export industry. Panama, which Trump is threatening with an invasion to bring the Panama Canal back under US control, already announced in early February that it would withdraw from the Chinese investment project of the New Silk Road (Belt and Road Initiative — BRI). [7] Colombia, which initially refused to allow deportation flights from the US to land, caved in within days after threats from Washington. And even Canada would hardly survive a military or economic conflict with the United States in the long run. The North American trade war that Trump sparked at the beginning of March 2025 will affect Canada more than the US.

Nordic Racism?

This Trumpian crisis imperialism, with its mix of Arctic expansionism, brutally direct extractivism, and southern isolationism, occasionally exhibits elements of outright fascism — as if the historical ideological hardening from imperialism to fascism in the 19th and 20th centuries was compressed into a few years in a crisis-induced reenactment in the 21st century. Trump cut all financial aid to South Africa — because, in his view, the white population in the Cape was being discriminated against. [8] South Africa’s white minority continues to be the most economically privileged section of the population, as the property relations cemented during apartheid were largely left untouched even after its dismantling. Washington used the South African government’s expropriation plans, intended to reduce these economic imbalances, as an excuse to put Pretoria under pressure.

But it didn’t stop there: South African-born Elon Musk publicly advocated for an exception to Washington’s restrictive immigration policies — for white South Africans [9], who are supposed to immigrate en masse to the United States as a “persecuted minority”. We live in a late-capitalist world of crisis, in which the so-called “leadership” of the United States wants to pursue a racist migration policy in which white South Africans are given free entry, while migrants from Latin American are deported en masse. [10] This with the obvious aim of changing the ethnic composition of the US in favour of the “white” population. One could speak here of a Nordic racism that complements the crisis-imperialism outlined above.

Trump’s fever dream of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, which is to be taken over by the US as a kind of colony and transformed into a ghetto for the rich — similar to Dubai or the United Arab Emirates — seems to be little more than a racist whim of the president, as this contradicts Washington’s fundamental geopolitical interests (“You break it, you own it”). [11] The bizarre AI-generated video depicting this fantasy — where Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu sip cocktails in a second “Riviera,” lined with luxury hotels, before heading to a nightclub to pick up women, as money rains from the sky — above all illustrates Trump’s megalomania, while also symbolically catering to the expulsion fantasies of the Israeli far-right. Yet from an ideological perspective, a crisis-driven impulse of the global oligarchy is expressed unfiltered here: the regressive effort to isolate itself from the rest of the late-capitalist world, which is in the process of decay, in order to freeze its luxury in space and time.

Ami goes home? [12]

Extractivism and imperial expansionism towards the North, racist isolationism towards the global South, brutal national great power politics based on protectionism and reindustrialisation — these appear to be the geopolitical pillars of Trump’s “America First” policy in the Western hemisphere. Trump’s pan-American empire-building, accompanied by bouts of megalomania, reflects an effort to (re)establish Washington’s geopolitical dominance in the Americas. However, this seems to go hand in hand with a strategic retreat from Europe. It is no exaggeration to assume that NATO is unlikely to survive Trump’s second presidency in its current form. The transatlantic military alliance — the foundation of the already crumbling US hegemony of recent decades — appears to be heading toward open disintegration.

The image of a mad emperor setting fire to an alliance system that Washington spent decades shaping seems almost inescapable when looking at Washington’s European policy. [13] One blow follows another. Shortly after taking office, Trump makes territorial demands against the EU (Greenland). In mid-February, Vice President Vance sparks a scandal at the Munich Security Conference with his attacks on the EU [14]. US government officials and employees interfere in the German election campaign and in the internal affairs of EU states in favour of fascist forces [15]. Trump and Vance humiliate the Ukraine president in front of live cameras at the end of February [16]. Now, Washington is planning a comprehensive troop withdrawal and/or redeployments in Europe — and, on top of the trade restrictions already in place, further tariffs against the EU are still on the table. Many US troops could be withdrawn, at least from Germany. Meanwhile, as part of Trump’s imperial extractivism, Kyiv is also being forced to sign a raw materials agreement that would secure the US control over half of Ukraine’s natural resources.

The open hostility toward former allies stands in stark contrast to a lightning-fast rapprochement with Moscow. Within just a few weeks, Washington and Moscow have initiated the normalisation of diplomatic relations and begun exploratory talks on the division of Ukraine — without Kyiv or the Europeans at the table. This contrasts with the escalation between Washington and Kyiv, which led to a temporary suspension of military support by the US. [17] A Washington-orchestrated regime change in Kyiv, the ousting of Zelensky, now seems entirely possible. Ukraine is effectively being driven toward capitulation, while preparations for a summit between Putin and Trump are already underway. [18]

Within a very short period of time, the former hegemonic power has executed a complete 180-degree geopolitical turn, shaking long-standing geopolitical alliances and structures to their core. These are weeks in which decades happen. So what is this all about? Pure madness from a US president drifting toward the far-right?

The rapprochement with Moscow could only be based on a geopolitical calculation if Trump is attempting to replicate Nixon’s actions. With his visit to China in 1972, Republican President Richard Nixon initiated a diplomatic normalisation and geopolitical rapprochement between the People’s Republic and Washington. This exploited Russian-Chinese tensions to exert greater pressure on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Trump now appears to be accommodating Russia — which would win the war over Ukraine in the medium term anyway — in order to weaken the Eurasian alliance between Beijing and Moscow and ultimately remove Moscow from this alliance. Statements from the Russian Foreign Ministry suggest as much. [19] Despite all the spectacular ruptures, it is useful to understand geopolitics as a continuum. And one of the continuities that all US administrations of the last two decades have been confronted with is the hopeless hegemonic conflict with China. [20] From Washington’s perspective, the war over Ukraine is only a prelude to the conflict over global dominance with China and the Eurasian power bloc that Beijing is striving to consolidate. After all, the Ukraine conflict began in 2014 [21] as a dispute over the border between the Eurasian sphere of influence and Washington’s Western-Oceanic alliance system.

Now that Russia has been weakened after three embarrassing years of war, Washington seems determined to undermine the Beijing-Moscow axis in preparation for the impending confrontation with China — especially as Russia has long since relegated to the role of “junior partner” in the Eurasian alliance, in danger of becoming a peripheral player. Nixon, a staunch anti-communist, was famously the only one who could go to Beijing — Trump at least seems to believe he can achieve something similar in Moscow. This is a fundamental geopolitical strategy that has always been discussed in Washington, even if it has faded into the background in recent years.

Nevertheless, the confrontational “policy” of the Trump administration toward the EU seems counterproductive, as Washington would need a stable alliance system in its fight against Beijing. It’s worth remembering that the United States has always had an ambivalent relationship with the European integration process; the allies that were part of the American sphere of hegemony repeatedly threatened to mutate into competitors — especially economically, given Europe’s high export surpluses and the deindustrialisation of the US.

This trend of the EU catching up with the US economically was only reversed in recent years — following the outbreak of the pandemic-induced crisis, the subsequent war in Ukraine, and Washington’s growing protectionist tendencies. Since then, the economic gap between the US and the EU has been widening, [22] while militarily Washington seems almost impossible to catch up with anyway. Under Trump, this transatlantic decoupling is now having geopolitical consequences. This became evident in the — well — “negotiations” over the fate of Ukraine, which essentially amount to the Trump administration blackmailing Kyiv. Meanwhile, the Europeans have been effectively excluded from the imperialist bargaining over the outcome of a war on their own continent.

Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed [23]

This feeling of powerlessness that spread through the European public — realising that the continent had suddenly become an object of great powers that have simply stepped over the EU without considering its concerns and interests — is an experience that Europe’s great powers had themselves inflicted on the Global South for centuries during their imperialist expansion. It is the feeling of impending peripheralisation. The EU is in economic decline and cannot be taken seriously militarily — after all, only the threat of nuclear world destruction still holds any weight in armed conflicts. Trump is merely drawing the imperialist conclusions from the socioeconomic and military developments of recent years, which have been further accelerated by the war in Ukraine.

This is why the EU is now reacting in panic with a rearmament push, at the centre of which will be nuclear armament. [24] If Trump or Putin are to be deterred from annexing Greenland or the Baltics, this can only be done by guaranteeing mutual destruction in nuclear fire. In the midst of the manifest socio-ecological crisis of the capitalist world system, Europe thus has every imperialist reason to expand its nuclear arsenal. A nuclear-armed Germany, led by the real-life satire of a Mr. Burns, where fascism is pushing its way to power [25] — what could possibly go wrong?

But why is the EU declining to the point where the Trump administration now treats it like a peripheral region? Another key continuity that Washington faces — though it cannot openly admit it — is the economic dimension of the crisis of capital. Only by considering this crisis dynamic can the collapse of the US hegemonic system be fully understood.

The economic crisis process [26] becomes particularly evident in protectionism, [27] which seeks to protect domestic industry or initiate reindustrialisation at the expense of competition. Trump’s protectionism — much like his Arctic expansion plans — essentially amounts to an implicit acknowledgement of the global crisis of capital, which, due to the level of industrial productivity achieved globally, is promoting deindustrialization tendencies, since new economic sectors that would exploit wage labor on a massive scale are not in sight. A new accumulation regime, such as post-war Fordism, can no longer be established because capital has, in a sense, become too productive for its own good. Wage labour, as the substance of capital. is being pushed further and further out of commodity production — and soon, even out of the service sector [28] — with every new wave of rationalisation.

And this is precisely why the alliance and hegemonic system of the US is collapsing, as the crisis is forcing states and economic regions into crisis competition for their industries, into protectionism — Washington can only try to influence the course of its hegemonic decline by replacing hegemony with imperial, military-based dominance, without the usual rhetoric about “values” and human rights.

Geopolitical hegemony is based on the acceptance or at least the tolerance of the hegemon’s position, as subordinate powers in the centres also benefit from the hegemonic system. However, this requires an economic foundation that makes such forms of mediated rule in the centres of the world system possible in the first place. This was particularly the case in the post-war period, as the aforementioned Fordist accumulation regime — the “post-war prosperity” — enabled a long period of economic expansion that coincided with the establishment of US hegemony. The rising tide lifted all ships in the centres — not only the US but also Europe and Japan benefited.

In response to the exhaustion of Fordism in the 1970s, financial market-driven neoliberal globalisation emerged, with the US as the world’s financial centre, effectively turning credit growth — that is, total debt rising faster than economic output — into the lubricant of US hegemony. Thanks to the dollar, the world’s reserve currency, the United States developed an unstable, speculation-fuelled deficit economy that facilitated ever-larger speculative bubbles and trade deficits. Like a black hole, the US was able to absorb the industrial overproduction of the hyper-productive global economy as long as the financial bubble economy could continue moving from one boom to the next despite ever-larger financial market tremors. Potential competitors of the US thus continued to have tangible economic incentives to accept the hegemonic position of Washington and the dollar — in the form of the growing trade surpluses they were able to achieve between New York and Los Angeles.

However, this global deficit economy, with the dollar as world money and the US as its hegemonic centre, has effectively begun to dissolve due to the crises of 2008 and 2020. The 2008 housing crisis caused a large part of the US middle class to fall into decline, paving the way for Trump’s protectionist right-wing populism, [29] while the surge in inflation in the wake of the pandemic put an end to the expansionary monetary policy of central banks, [30] effectively choking off the global deficit economy — with the exception of the US, where the Greenback remains the (eroding) ultimate measure of value.

Since then, hegemony can no longer be maintained because there is simply nothing left to “distribute” in order to maintain a system of rules based on consent or tolerance, including the corresponding institutions. Washington no longer wants to bear the costs of its hegemony — socio-economically, due to the high trade deficits, deindustrialisation, tendencies towards social disintegration, and the associated political instability. And militarily, Washington, which is groaning under a gigantic budget deficit, is also demanding that Europe increase its defence spending. Trump’s empire-building is therefore a sign of weakness, not a return to former strength.

The US can only impose its will on the outside world through dominance, i.e. the militarily or economic enforcement of its interests, which ultimately has already transformed Washington’s hegemony into history. Europe is effectively being abandoned by Washington; the entire European hegemonic system is up for grabs because this is how this is how the crisis is being executed. What Germany did in Europe after the outbreak of the euro crisis — shifting the consequences of the crisis onto the South — is now being carried out in the transatlantic alliance. Someone has to fall; the crisis has long since reached the centres, and Trump seems to want to turn the Europeans into a crisis-ridden periphery in the same way Schäuble did with Southern Europe. The EU is weak — economically, but above all militarily — which is why it is becoming a target.

What might now happen to the Western alliance system more closely resembles the collapse of the Soviet Union — leaving behind fragments that would likely sink into isolated, national, fascist regression. It would be as if Russia were to withdraw from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The brilliant prediction made by crisis theorist Robert Kurz at the time of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc is likely to become reality in the coming years: the collapse of Soviet-style state capitalism in the East, which was enthusiastically celebrated by the West, was merely the precursor to the world crisis of capital, which would ultimately also engulf the Western centres, Kurz argued in the theoretical classic The Collapse of Modernisation. [31]

Yes, panic! [32]

Without the US, which now seriously wants to annex Canada [33] and military occupy the Panama Canal, [34] the West and NATO are nothing more than empty shells. Nor will there be any new, stable alliance systems; Trump is not building a lasting alliance with Russia. There is no longer an economic foundation for stable hegemonic systems, which can only exist under capitalism if there is a sufficiently broad exploitation of labour-power in the production of commodities and a sufficient supply of resources. In the midst of the manifest socio-ecological crisis of capital, neither condition is met — the eroding, late-capitalist state monsters will tend to escalate crisis competition to the point of military conflict [35]. After the first cracks in the geopolitical power structure of the West — such as Brexit — the major qualitative rupture that will end the era of Western hegemony and a Western-dominated world system now seems imminent.

The actions of Russia and Turkey may provide a glimpse of a chaotic world system in which no major power is able to achieve a hegemonic position due to the ongoing crisis process. Both state monsters pursue their narrow-minded imperial goals — including resorting to war, massacres, and ethnic cleansing — in constantly changing constellations, where yesterday’s allies can very quickly become today’s enemies. Sometimes, co-operation in one area (such as Russia building a nuclear power plant in Turkey) can go hand in hand with confrontation in another (Ankara has effectively wrested Syria from Russia’s sphere of influence).

The Western public, which sees NATO and the West as constants, is not yet used to legitimising abrupt imperial shifts of course. The Putin troll, [36] who despite all Russian disasters interprets every volte-face of the Kremlin as an expression of Putin’s genius, can serve as a model for the future Orwellian reinterpretation of reality through media mouthpieces. Soon enough, even respectable Western media will learn to adopt these reinterpretations of geopolitical reality, provided the constellations change accordingly. The New Yorker is already practising. [37]

All states that still have the means to do so will pursue both isolation and expansion: isolation to protect their industrial base and shield themselves from the crisis misery of the periphery, and expansion within the framework of crisis-imperialist extractivism [38] to secure increasingly scarce raw materials, food, and energy sources. [39] It is obvious that Europe, too, will be affected by these crisis-induced centrifugal forces; the EU is indeed the weakest link in the geopolitical crisis chain. The current process of Western disintegration will not result in a stronger EU, but will instead accelerate its process of dissolution.

Due to their intra-European competition, the EU states offer Washington, Moscow, or Beijing perfect leverage to intervene in Europe: Hungary’s loyalty to Putin, the Franco-German struggle for dominance, Poland’s fear of a rapprochement between Russia and Germany, the divide between Northern and Southern Europe: Trumpian Europe will not form a stable geopolitical bloc, but will sink into regression and nationalism — similar to the byproducts of the Soviet Union’s disintegration. The next ecological or economic crisis will take care of the rest, sweeping away the last remnants of transnational institutions and alliances.

The crisis is the driving force fuelling the disintegration of Western institutions and alliances; Trump, like the right in general, merely serves as its executor. What appears irrational about Trump’s — well — “politics” simply reflects the irrationality of the capitalist process dying from its escalating social and ecological contradictions. The panic and chaos now gripping the world system are real; they are not simply triggered by Trump’s idiocy or intentions. The contradictions — as expressed, for example, in Trump’s eternal protectionist course corrections — are real, growing in intensity, and can no longer be bridged by neoliberal crisis-management strategies. The right, which is drifting towards fascist extremism, is the subjective executor [40] of the objectively imminent crisis breakthrough. Everything must burn because capital is collapsing on itself. [41] Trump is merely a medium for the self-destruction of the automatic subject suffocating from its contradictions.

The novel moment is that the functional elites, i.e. the profiteers of the subjectless rule of capital [42], have now realised what at least the German left, in its regressive populist stupidity, refuses to acknowledge: the system is at its end. This characterises their politics of panic, where decades-old constellations are severed, borders closed, and resource-rich regions conquered for the sake of sheer survival. It is an attempt to switch to a different crisis mode of rule by means of imperialism, fascism, and sheer isolation. A kind of slow-motion panic is unfolding, in which the prepper mentality is becoming the guiding geopolitical principle: the delusional belief in sealing oneself off from the crisis, [43] which operates within the internal contradictions of every capitalist society. Trump, Musk & Co. act like billionaire preppers.

This crisis-induced geopolitical slow-motion panic, in which the US is burning down its own world system in order to pursue empire-building, can only lead to increasing military conflicts. [44] These are the inevitable outcome of crisis competition at the state level, especially in light of the increasing processes of state erosion. Everything will burn, [45] unless capital is overcome in an emancipatory way. Does that sound illusory? And yet, there is no alternative but to try.

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Translated from the original German

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/verhaeltnis-usa-deutschland-j-d-vance-knuepft-us-schutz-fuer-deutschland-an-bedingungen-a-8daf2bb8-b131-4b5c-a624-9b7e28037369

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_oJf54ZoRE

[3] https://www.konicz.info/2022/06/23/was-ist-krisenimperialismus/

[4] https://www.konicz.info/2013/10/05/2639/

[5] https://www.akweb.de/politik/was-ist-krisenimperialismus-und-wie-unterscheidet-er-sich-vom-klassischen-imperialismus/

[6] https://jungle.world/artikel/2023/45/nearshoring-ende-der-aera-der-globalisierung-neue-kapitalistische-naehe

[7] https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/02/panama-canal-trump-china-crisis?lang=en

[8] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-signs-executive-order-aimed-south-africa-white-house-official-says-2025-02-07/

[9] https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/celeb-news/local-celebs/elon-musk-white-south-africans-immigration-donald-trump-latest/

[10] https://www.konicz.info/2025/02/06/cancel-culture-usa/