As we pass the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, every day brings further evidence that a remarkably long-lived US-led international order is over.
—Financial Times on May 9, 2025
This is the uncomfortable reality the US ruling class has been grappling with over the last few months. The 80-year period during which they were the undisputed masters of world capitalism, has come to an end.
Trump certainly did not cause this change, which has been decades in the making. But during his first few months back in office, his actions have served to catalyze and accelerate these tectonic geopolitical shifts. For all his administration’s bluster and overconfidence, they see the changed position of the US more clearly than the liberal establishment. As Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, bluntly acknowledged in an interview with Megyn Kelly in January:
It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power…That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia.
This recognition of reality lies behind Trump’s many breaks with modern US political orthodoxy: his embrace of tariffs, his adversarial tone towards Europe with regard to the Ukraine war negotiations, his open vying for US control of Greenland and Panama, and his efforts to “reshore” manufacturing jobs.
Sounding the alarm bells
Faced with this world-historic turning point, the bourgeois press has been forced to acknowledge the relative decline of US imperialism more bluntly than ever. Eager to do their part to help maintain the US’s standing in the world, the columns of the business press are full of dire warnings about the decaying state of US capitalism.
“In shipbuilding, the US is tiny and rusty,” wrote the Wall Street Journal in March. “Asian shipyards churn out hundreds of big boxships and oil tankers a year. The US is lucky if it can finish more than one each year.”
The next month, the same mouthpiece of US finance capital published an article titled, “How the US Lost Its Place as the World’s Manufacturing Powerhouse.” As they explain: “In the 1950s, around 35% of private-sector jobs in the US were in manufacturing. Today, there are 12.8 million manufacturing jobs in the US, an amount equal to 9.4% of those private-sector jobs.”
This has troubling implications for the overall economic and social stability of US capitalism—hence Trump’s futile attempt to “bring back all those jobs” through applying tariffs.
In April, after the Trump administration suggested that iPhones might soon be manufactured in the United States, articles appeared in virtually all major newspapers explaining why that is absolutely impossible.
“Trump’s dream of made-in-the-USA iPhones isn’t going to happen,” warned Bloomberg. The US simply lacks the labor force and supply chains to do that, having outsourced it all to countries with far lower wages long ago. One estimate found that an American-made iPhone might cost $3,500—and even if it were somehow profitable to produce iPhones in the US, it would take years, if not decades, to build out the necessary supply chains and factories, not to mention the educational system required to produce a far larger manufacturing work force.
As for other products, making an “All-American” product is no easier. As the Wall Street Journal explained, “key components are too expensive, too scarce or simply unavailable from US sources.”
The rise of China
These developments didn’t seem so bad to the capitalists twenty or thirty years ago. While they outsourced millions of jobs to countries like China and Mexico in the 1990s and 2000s, they assured themselves that the US was simply transitioning to a “service-based economy”—naively confident that they would remain in charge of the world economy forever.
Now the US capitalists are panicking about the rise of China, which has emerged as a powerful imperialist power in its own right. Suddenly, the US’s lack of “hard” economic power has become a national-security-threatening liability.
The tone of the mainstream media with regard to China has shifted in recent months. Most of them no longer ask whether China “will eventually catch up.” Instead, many of them are forced to acknowledge that Chinese capitalism has caught up—and is even racing ahead of US capitalism in certain key fields.
In an April article titled, “Underestimating China: Why America Needs a New Strategy of Allied Scale to Offset Beijing’s Enduring Advantages,” Foreign Affairs explains:
Although still catching up in fields such as biotechnology and aviation, which have been traditional US strengths, China … produced almost half the world’s chemicals, half the world’s ships, more than two-thirds of electric vehicles, more than three-quarters of electric batteries, 80% of consumer drones, and 90% of solar panels and critical refined rare-earth minerals … China was responsible for half of all industrial robot installations worldwide (seven times as many as the United States), and it is a decade ahead of anyone else in commercializing fourth-generation nuclear technology, with plans to build over 100 reactors in 20 years. The last great power to so thoroughly dominate global production was the United States, from the 1870s to the 1940s.
They note that in an earlier period, the United Kingdom was the undisputed imperialist behemoth worldwide—before it was supplanted by the United States and Germany in the early 20th century. “Know your rival,” the authors advise, as they provide a myriad of facts and figures about Chinese capitalism’s meteoric rise.
The Wall Street Journal likewise warns in an article from May:
[China’s] electric-car companies are among the world’s best. Chinese AI startups rival OpenAI and Google. The country’s biologists are pushing the boundaries of pharmaceutical research, and its factories are being filled with advanced robotics.
At sea, Chinese-made cargo vessels dominate global shipping. In space, the country has been launching hundreds of satellites to monitor every corner of the Earth. Beyond frontier technology, Beijing is pursuing greater self-reliance in food and energy, and has bulked up its military.
Meanwhile, in a New York Times opinion piece from March, Thomas Friedman observes:
I had a choice the other day in Shanghai: Which Tomorrowland to visit? Should I check out the fake, American-designed Tomorrowland at Shanghai Disneyland, or should I visit the real Tomorrowland—the massive new research center, roughly the size of 225 football fields, built by the Chinese technology giant Huawei? I went to Huawei’s.
It was fascinating and impressive but ultimately deeply disturbing, a vivid confirmation of what a US businessman who has worked in China for several decades told me in Beijing. “There was a time when people came to America to see the future,” he said. “Now they come here.”
But there is no real future anywhere on the planet under capitalism. While Chinese capitalism has certainly ascended astonishingly rapidly, capitalism as a global system is exhausted, and both the American and Chinese capitalist classes are sitting on a ticking time bomb of class struggle. Our task is to prepare for this period of economic, political, and social instability by urgently building a class-independent communist party. And as communists in the United States, we must be clear: the main enemy is at home.