This article is based on a leadoff on US Perspectives given at the September 12–13 meeting of the RCA’s Central Committee.

On January 10, 2025, before the start of Trump’s second term, we published an article titled “Trump’s Empire of Chaos and the Delusion of ‘Fortress America.’” Given the many unknowns at the time, it holds up quite well overall. However, we made at least one glaring mistake. And that was to try to anticipate Trump’s actions rationally.

The problem is, capitalism isn’t a rational system, and Trump isn’t a rational actor. As we’ve explained, echoing Tolstoy, Trump is a slave of history. He is merely the caricatured personification of decaying US capitalism—an ignorant, uncultured bully, serving to accelerate the system’s terminal decline. However, even an Abraham Lincoln couldn’t fundamentally change the course of the American Titanic as it speeds towards the iceberg.

Given the changing balance of world economic and military power, a concerted retrenching to the Americas made logical sense. The Trump administration even articulated this idea in its National Security Strategy document in December 2025.

US imperialism may eventually go that route out of necessity. But in the short term, it couldn’t escape the inertia of its postwar hubris. Far from extricating itself from the Middle East, as Trump had previously promised to do, US imperialism now finds itself bogged down in an unwinnable war against Iran.

As we’ve explained elsewhere, the US has enjoyed a privileged geographic position since its founding. As Otto Von Bismarck is alleged to have said: “The Americans are a very lucky people. They’re bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.”

However, the country’s spatial insulation was always relative. Geography can’t cushion the American nation-state in its epoch of decay and decline indefinitely. Despite the recent disruptions to US-centric globalization—with China having emerged as the world’s premiere industrial and manufacturing power—the world is more interconnected than ever. Not only is US imperialism within range of several countries’ intercontinental ballistic missiles, but it is vulnerable to total economic and social collapse, precisely because of its central role in the world capitalist system.

The ruling class is increasingly desperate, no one more so than Trump. He promised a golden age of no wars and low prices. Instead, Americans are paying $1 million every two minutes as a result of the Iran fiasco.

On February 28, the day the US launched its war against Iran, Brent crude futures were trading for $67 per barrel, and the yield on the 10-year US Treasury bond was just below 4%. Brent has now risen to $107, and the 10-year bond has surpassed 5%, a dangerous psychological threshold. Mortgage rates are again above 7%, putting homeownership even further out of reach for millions. If they continue their upward trend, these three numbers alone could lead to an economic meltdown—followed by social strife on a scale not seen in decades.

The longer the crisis continues, the more likely the current disruption to energy supplies will be replaced by demand destruction. This would bring down prices, but would be potentially catastrophic to the US and world economy. It would no longer be a matter of clearing a bottleneck to get things back to the status quo ante, but of companies and even countries shutting down altogether, cutting off energy demand indefinitely, leading to a downward spiral.

This is why there’s a new distraction, a new “Hail Mary pass” almost every day. Like Bibi Netanyahu, Trump thrives on chaos and is confident he’ll come out on top in a scramble. But there are limits to how much chaos other major powers will tolerate, as they themselves are sitting on powder kegs of class struggle. Nor will the masses stand idly by as their quality of life is degraded week after week.

Changing world order

Given the fast and furious flow of events, it’s easy to get dragged into the weeds. Our task as Marxists is to focus on the fundamentals. As we zero in on this or that aspect of the bigger picture and triangulate our understanding through a series of successive approximations, we should strive for a “long zoom” approach, never forgetting that everything is interrelated—from the AI bubble to Israel’s genocide, the Gulf States, Iran, China, the Ukraine war, BRICS, the debt crisis, midterms, and the resurgence of the DSA. However, not all elements in the big-picture equation carry equal weight. We must learn to differentiate the essential from the anecdotal, while recognizing that the anecdotal can often express far deeper necessity than raw facts and figures.

To put everything into its proper context, we need to identify the gravitational center of the phenomena we’re dealing with. When it comes to US perspectives, it is not merely a question of the accelerating decline of American capitalism and its foreign-policy extension; it is the dizzying decline of the postwar, post-Soviet, “rules-based international order,” with the US at its epicenter.

Even The New York Times and other bourgeois outlets have started acknowledging that the dominant world order is no longer tenable. They even use examples from nature—straight out of Engels or Reason in Revolt. As historian Margaret MacMillan wrote in a guest essay:

When a storm is coming, there will always be signs. The wind might suddenly drop. The tide goes out farther than usual. Streamers of clouds sail across the sky.

 

It’s possible to misread or even ignore these signs—to insist that the drops of rain are just a passing shower—until it’s too late. That’s when the real trouble arrives.

 

What is true of weather is also true of human affairs. Regimes look strong until they don’t. Revolutions at home and upheavals in the international order—the two so often go together—are easy to see in retrospect, but are not always anticipated. Yet if we look closer, we’ll often find the signs were there…

And in a new piece in Foreign Affairs, Mark Leonard writes:

It is time to acknowledge that the old order really has disappeared—and to plot a new approach to geopolitics. This moment does not constitute a short interregnum between a US-led order and a Chinese-led one. For some time, the world will be without any order at all—swept by fragmentation, contagion, and strangulation or the temptation to weaponize a wide variety of geographic, economic, and technological chokepoints. Rather than constructing a grand strategy, states will need to develop far more flexible and artisanal responses…

 

Americans [have] already lost interest in being the world’s primary provider of public goods, its police officer, and its free-trade champion. And no other power has the ambition to take up the mantle.

This is the voice of the petty-bourgeoisie, as it frantically warns the ruling class to change course. However, it’s not that the US has “lost interest” in being the world’s hegemon—it’s that the economic underpinning of its military might has been severely undermined.

For a time, the US imperialists could live off the inertia of their unquestionable 20th-century dominance. They puffed up their chests and faked it, hoping they could eventually actually make it again. But the laws of economic, geopolitical, and class-struggle gravity eventually and inevitably assert themselves. Unfortunately for the imperialists, a qualitative difference exists between projecting perceived power and exercising actual power.

Ukraine drew back the curtain, but the Iran War has conclusively demonstrated that the US-imperialist emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. World orders rest on concrete relations of forces. Old ones fall, and new ones emerge in periods of major economic, social, political, and military upheaval. Think of the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War, or the Concert of Europe following the Napoleonic era.

For decades, the US-dictated world order emerging from the carnage of World War II dominated the planet. However, everything turns into its opposite. Institutions and conventions such as the United Nations, NATO, the G20, EU, World Bank, IMF, the OECD, WTO, NPT, IAEA, SWIFT payment system, petrodollar and more, all reflect a balance of forces that no longer exists.

BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), CIPS payment system, Belt and Road Initiative, International North–South Transport Corridor, the Mecca Accord, and other similar initiatives are attempts to create new or parallel architectures for trade, energy, finance, and security—preferably without the need for a frontal confrontation with the currently dominant structures.

Some have called this process the “fall of the West and the rise of the rest.” Remember, for much of human history, the Asian parts of the Eurasian continent were powerful centers of world economic, military, and cultural power. China, India, Iran, and Russia are civilizational states with deep historical roots.

As significant as it was, Western dominance over the last 500 years—including America’s dominance over the last 80—represents a relative historical blip. Today, the country that produced Beethoven, Marx, and Einstein gives us Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor who says Germans must accept deindustrialization without a social safety net, and militarism without money—all in the name of human rights and liberal democracy in the abstract. Little wonder his party got stomped in the recent Saxony-Anhalt election.

Multipolarity?

For decades, people referred to “dollar diplomacy.” In practice, however, it’s been dollar domination, humiliation, and punishment. This is why a growing number of countries are saying enough is enough and are starting to push back against US imperialism and its institutions.

As early as 1997, the Russians warned against NATO expansion toward their borders. During a speech at the Atlantic Council in June of that year, Joe Biden mocked them, basically saying that if they didn’t like the American world order, they could try their luck with China, or, if they preferred, Iran. Infected with their “end-of-history” delusion, the whole room burst out laughing.

However, the so-called “unipolar moment” was a historical aberration. It was an anomalous exception in a world divided into competing nation-states. The emergence of “multipolarity” is really just a convulsive return to the old normality.

 

As revolutionary communists, we stand for class independence and united, internationalist struggle against capitalism and imperialism, at home and abroad. As it happens, we live in the US, which is the most reactionary imperialist power the world has ever seen. However, that doesn’t mean we support Russian or Chinese imperialism. It merely means that our main enemy is at home.

As with the capitalists, our foreign policy is a continuation of our class-independent domestic policy. Our class solidarity and independence extend to the international arena as well. We do not choose between allegedly lesser evils. The enemy of my enemy isn’t automatically my friend if he is also the enemy of my friend.

Putin and Xi Jinping may be rivals to US imperialism, but above all, they are the enemies of the Russian and Chinese workers—and many others besides. However, this doesn’t mean we’re indifferent to US imperialism getting a bloody nose, which opens further possibilities for the class struggle in the US.

The end of US hegemony is an enormous turning point in the world situation. In the long run, it will prove even more decisive than the fall of the Soviet Union. We have referred to this process as a violent shifting of the tectonic plates for a reason. There will be many second- and third-order effects we can’t even begin to imagine.

However, more imperialist poles doesn’t mean capitalism’s fundamental problems have been resolved. Far from it. The short-lived and extremely relative Pax Americana is giving way to a world of intensifying inter-imperialist chaos as the new players try to force Washington to accept that it is merely one big power among many. During the Cold War, US imperialism’s policy was to “contain” the Soviet Union. In recent years, its policy has been to “contain” China. Today, Russia, China, and Iran aim to contain US imperialism.

Multipolarity has been a geopolitical buzzword over the last couple of years. However, Ambassador Chas Freeman’s concept of multinodality offers a more nuanced paradigm for understanding the complexities of world relations in the current epoch—while never losing sight of the class divisions that permeate all societies.

The concept of poles comes from physics. The example of North and South is the easiest to understand, with two equal, opposite, and interpenetrating poles along an axis. When you think about the etymology of the word “unipolar,” it becomes especially clear how unnatural, imbalanced, and impermanent such a state is.

A node, on the other hand, is a point in a network, and each node can have many connections to other nodes. Instead of two neatly defined poles, multinodal relations are more like a messy tangle of brambles. As an academic essay in the China International Strategy Review explains:

A multinodal world is an asymmetric matrix of actors, each embedded in a web of relationships, in which the horizontal business of continuous interaction matters more than the vertical business of one power imposing on another.

As Lord Palmerston famously put it, there are no permanent allies or permanent enemies; only permanent interests. Most countries, including supposedly die-hard US allies, also have connections to China, Russia, or Iran, in some form or another, whether for energy, manufactured imports, technology, tourism, or something else. The US itself has myriad ties with China and quite a few also with Russia.

Japan has territorial disputes with both Russia and China, yet depends on its neighbors for natural gas and manufactured goods. China is the Philippines’s biggest trading partner, yet the US has at least nine de facto bases in its former colony. Turkey is a member of NATO but has also joined the so-called Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. India is a member of the Quad, which includes the US, Japan, and Australia. But it’s also part of BRICS, which China and Russia dominate. And on and on.

In a complex nodal system like this, different powers have different kinds of interconnections and different forms of leverage over each other. Of course, some nodes are far more important and decisive than others, based on the quantity and quality of their interconnections. But even an impoverished country—like Houthi-controlled Yemen—can have an outsized impact on the world economy and world relations, depending on the concrete circumstances.

Strategic defeat

After promising no more forever wars, Trump is stuck in another quagmire. “Forever” is a relative term, of course—Afghanistan “only” lasted around 20 years. But US imperialism doesn’t have 20 years to muck about with Iran before admitting defeat or artificially declaring victory.

Far from a repeat of Venezuela, the Iranian state is stronger than ever. It took US imperialism’s best punch and is still standing. For its part, US imperialism’s financial, political, military, and credibility are all deeply depleted, not to mention its strategic petroleum reserves.

All of US imperialism’s Persian-Gulf bases have been severely compromised, and it no longer has the logistical network in place needed to seriously renew hostilities. Ejecting US imperialism from the region is one of Iran’s strategic goals, and they clearly have escalation dominance.

Rather than respond tit for tat, Iran has vowed to retaliate tenfold against any further aggression. Instead of merely targeting stationary bases, they are now targeting mobile aircraft carriers and destroyers. They appear to have unstoppable hypersonic anti-ship missiles that could cause a mass casualty event. Iranian President Pezeshkian recently threw down the gauntlet: “If Americans are warriors, let them face our valiant military forces. Why wage war on civilian infrastructure, food supplies, and livelihoods?”

Iran will decide when the war is over, not US imperialism—though Trump might yet fabricate a victory and try to walk away. However, until a new regional order is in place, there won’t be lasting peace, especially given Israel’s forever wars and genocides.

Trump and Bibi put all their chips on regime change but lost their bet. With the Israeli elections and US midterms fast approaching, Iran has time on its side. Though its economy and population are suffering, they know they have Trump boxed in and will continue to amp up the economic and military pressure.

Diesel prices are at an all-time high, with gasoline and jet fuel not far behind. Some gas stations in California have maxed out their pumps’ $9.999 limit and can’t display the actual price.

America’s strategic oil reserves have been depleted, meaning the system no longer has a buffer to absorb another major blow—for example, a hurricane that shuts down the refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the importance of oil and energy, the US has not built any new greenfield refineries since the 1970s. And yet, US refiners continue to export diesel to other markets where they can make a higher profit, including to Israel and the US military.

There are also severe shortages of urea and helium, which are essential for industrial agriculture and AI chip production. For the first six months of the war, the stock and futures markets appeared to defy gravity as they ignored the realities on the ground. But the physical shortages are now catching up with the market speculators.

Let us also remember that war in the Persian Gulf and sanctions against Russia aren’t the only reasons for high energy prices. Private companies own these industries and are making a killing off this crisis. Chevron just announced its highest-ever quarterly earnings. Shell had its second-highest quarterly profits. And ExxonMobil doubled its earnings compared with last year. Combined, these three companies raked in, on average, around $404 million in profits every day for the last three months. 

Trump’s social media posts can’t stop these abuses, because you can’t control what you don’t own, and the president isn’t about to nationalize Big Oil.

As far as Iran is concerned, the Memorandum of Understanding Trump signed in the Palace of Versailles remains the minimum baseline for a lasting settlement. Its terms represent a humiliating strategic defeat. There is no military way out of the mess, and yet a political resolution that meets Iran’s terms seems light years away.

Trump and co. always saw the memorandum as just another piece of paper to be ignored and violated when convenient—much like the 300-plus treaties the US signed with Indigenous nations over the centuries. It’s all smoke and mirrors to buy time. As Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, has highlighted, the US is agreement-incapable.

In an attempt to manipulate both the market and opinion polls, Trump has declared Iran obliterated and announced its impending capitulation dozens of times. But the US Central Command is so out of its depth that one of its intelligence officers sent a crowdsourcing email to a wide group of military analysts asking for “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.”

After so-called “maximum pressure” sanctions failed, the latest embarrassing stunt was Treasury Secretary Bessent’s promise of “Economic D-Day.” Most of the world simply ignored him. The reality is that the US blockade is more PR than substance, given the Navy’s limited presence in the region, not to mention the dire shortage of defensive and offensive munitions. Military analyst Colonel Douglas McGregor believes the Iran War represents the biggest strategic defeat the US has suffered in two centuries.

The failure is so abject that some insiders are seriously worried that Trump or the Israelis may go so far as to use nuclear weapons against a target like Pickaxe Mountain, possibly around the anniversary of October 7. Mutually assured destruction be damned—they might yet pop the cork on a Pandora’s box that could lead to total human annihilation. Although it seems absurd to even be talking about it, the fact that such ideas are making the rounds at all is a further indication of just how unfit these people are to rule over us.

The Iran War also represents a total failure of the Greater Israel project. Without constant war and expansion, Israel has no real reason to exist, especially now that it has shown itself incapable of providing a safe home for Jewish people.

Russia has won the Ukraine war

Then there’s the other main front in US imperialism’s effort to bring China to heel, and that’s their failed effort to bring down Russia via Ukraine. This is another colossal strategic defeat with incalculable repercussions.

After years of slow, grinding attrition—while balancing the domestic economy with the needs of the military, as well as several attempts at a negotiated settlement—the Russians are taking off the kid gloves. There is still plenty of scope for intensifying the conflict and taking quite a bit more Ukrainian territory.

Instead of regime change and economic collapse in Iran and Russia, the imperialists may well end up with these things across Europe and in the US itself. The Europeans have not only ruined their economies and upturned their politics over their truly insane commitment to the Ukraine war, but they could be facing a wave of revolutions on the scale of 1848, sooner than we might think.

Furthermore, the twin strategic disasters in Iran and Ukraine mean that any serious military or economic confrontation between the US and China is all but ruled out, certainly in the short to medium term. Otto Von Bismarck is alleged to have said that “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” It would appear that God’s providential indulgence has run out.

After WWII and especially after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, American imperialism had the privilege of power, plenty of accumulated fat, and room for maneuver. It could survive military disasters like Vietnam or even Iraq and Afghanistan. Not anymore. They got complacent and fell behind. They have become so narrowly fixated on short-term profits, so reliant on bullying and making empty threats, that by the time they retool, it will be too late.

Once upon a time, the US military was prepared to wage two major wars in two major theaters. Some years ago, they were forced to reduce their ambitions to one major war. Now, they aren’t even able to win a regional war against a mid-grade power like Iran.

The “Pivot to Asia” and the Pacific, initiated under Obama, has been scuttled. In fact, US imperialism is losing ground in the region as its policies push many countries closer to their behemothic neighbor, China.

In the final analysis, it’s a question of the military-industrial balance of power. Mass attracts mass, and Chinese manufacturing dwarfs every other country’s, with around double that of the US.

Since the late 1970s, US factory jobs have fallen sharply as a share of total employment, from over 19 million manufacturing jobs in 1979 to around 13 million today. This was despite the population growing by roughly 50% over the same period. From nearly 20% of total employment in 1979, it now accounts for a mere 8%.

While it’s true that greater productivity and technological advances have allowed fewer US workers to produce more total output, manufacturing’s share of US GDP has fallen from around 25% in 1979 to less than half that. But deindustrialization and the “China shock” were driven not only by the pursuit of higher profits by individual companies, but also by the government’s taxation and trade policies.

Compare this to China’s trajectory over the last 50 years, which was heavily influenced by a very different kind of government policy: a variation of state capitalism, including five-year plans, a holdover from the nationalized planned economy of the past. In 1978, China accounted for just 2–3% of world manufacturing output. It now produces roughly 30%.

Its medium-term policy is to become as self-sufficient as possible, while remaining the world’s greatest export platform. Needless to say, China also faces the insoluble contradictions of capitalism, with overproduction posing a serious threat to its continued growth and internal stability. But the US is in a much more precarious position in the near-term.

The American ruling class thought they could live beyond their means indefinitely; that they could find a shortcut around the inherent capitalist contradiction of the nation-state. So they offshored to China. But this is capitalism, and nation-states remain integral to the system. Possession is 9/10 the law, and the Chinese nation-state now holds a wide range of manufacturing and technological trump cards.

Over the same period, the US economy has been heavily financialized. This was a decades-long shift from producing useful goods and services toward stocks, bonds, real estate, currency, and other forms of speculation, as well as lending, fees, asset management, dividends, buybacks, and mergers, instead of productive reinvestment.

Households have been compelled to rely on debt to maintain living standards, and the state has turned to money-printing to sustain growth. While this has postponed crises in the short term, in the long run, it ramps up inflation, amplifies speculative bubbles, and exacerbates the system’s inherent tendency toward cyclical crashes and overproduction.

So when you hear someone refer to “investors” these days, replace that word with “speculators” or “gamblers” or “grifters.” There’s very little serious, long-term investment; most of the profits go toward CEO pay and stock buybacks.

The scale of the modern economy is such that the amounts needed to get a competitive enterprise off the ground are colossal. Only billionaire venture capitalists have that kind of cash. But given the precarious state of the world economy, they rarely make lasting investments in companies’ long-term futures; rather, they bet on whether a stock, commodity, or currency will rise or fall in the short term so they can make a quick buck—as if they needed any more. According to Fortune, the world’s roughly 4,000 billionaires hold an astonishing $15 trillion in wealth.

From the perspective of the majority, not only are the biggest companies too big to fail—i.e., too big to remain in private hands—they are too big to develop seriously in the interests of the majority. The only other entity that can come up with those kinds of resources is the state—yet another argument for socialism.

As for the arms race, by the metrics that really matter in modern warfare, the US has lost it, almost certainly to Russia, and probably also to China. As one example, it doesn’t have a single serviceable hypersonic missile, something even Iran and possibly even the Houthis have, let alone Russia and China. Critical minerals like samarium and yttrium, which are needed for producing advanced weapons, are now almost entirely under China’s control. China and Russia have also both developed new satellite/GPS technology, whose precision and military applications have been tested in Ukraine and in the Persian Gulf.

Connected with this is the broader question of military efficiency, of bang for your military-spending buck. There’s a qualitative difference between a state-owned or directed military-industrial complex and budget such as Russia’s, aimed primarily at national defense in your concrete circumstances, able to scale up quickly as needed; and a privately owned complex geared toward maximizing profits through government contracts and arms exports by offering all kinds of unproven bells and whistles.

The lucrative revolving door between government, the private arms industry, and lobbyists is just one expression of this. Former defense secretaries, high-ranking generals, and government officials sit on the boards of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman.

Over 98% of US lawmakers receive financial contributions from the arms industry. Congressmen and women add billions of “pork-barrel” dollars to the national budget for obsolete or unneeded weapons systems to protect manufacturing jobs and supplier networks in their home districts. And now Israel is to be directly looped in via Section 224 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act—also known as the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.

This isn’t to say profit and corruption don’t exist in countries like China, Russia, or Iran, but the scale in the US is on another level. The US arms industry, once one of the greatest sources of military power and profit, has now set US imperialism up for strategic disaster. 

NATO Secretary Mark Rutte acknowledged the practical result in June 2025:

They [the Russians] are now producing, in terms of ammunition, in three months what the whole of NATO is producing in a year.

The gap between NATO’s capacity and Russia’s has only widened since. Add to that the mess in Iran. In the first 40 days of the war, the US used up 50% to 80% of its total stockpiles, depending on the type of ammunition. It will take them between two and eight years to make up for this shortfall—assuming they don’t expend any more—which they already have.

As for the Saudis, they believed their oil riches and prostration to Washington could buy them security. Their defense budget is ten times Iran’s. As it turns out, all the money they spent on overpriced US weapons went down the drain. They have proven unable to defend themselves against the Houthis—who now control even more of the Bab al-Mandab access to the Red Sea—let alone Iran, which managed to hold off what was alleged to be the most fearsome military on the planet.

In short, the US is an arrogant 20th-century empire fighting a 21st-century war with technologies and strategies from the 1980s and 1990s. Needless to say, this is a recipe for disaster.

Petrodollar in crisis

All of this calls into question the US dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency. When Nixon was compelled to end the international gold standard in 1971, the US promised the Saudis they would protect them in perpetuity, as long as they recycled all their oil sales through the US economy. As a major oil producer and the leading member of OPEC, this set the tone for oil-producing and buying countries to settle their exchanges in dollars. Thus was born the petrodollar.

In reality, it was a crude protection racket: “Park your vast wealth in our treasuries and banks so that we can live beyond our means, and you won’t have to worry about your neighbors.” It seemed like a win-win. However, it was also a confidence trick, predicated on the stability of the US economy and the power of its military.

The Iran War upended everything. The Saudis are now only producing as much as they did in 1990 and have had to apply to the IMF for a loan to cover their bills. After being left hanging by his Mecca Accord partners, Mohammad Bin Salman is reported to have called Trump twice in a single day to beg him to intervene against Ansar Allah (aka the Houthis), but he flatly refused. The Saudis have reportedly even reached out to the Israelis for military help—a scandalous request that could accelerate the fall of MBS or the House of Saud itself.

But the implications go well beyond Saudi Arabia. If the US can’t hold up its end of the bargain, the petrodollar won’t be long for this world. Other “allies” in Asia and elsewhere are already hedging their bets. Many are liquidating dollar-denominated assets to meet domestic needs.

This is one reason countries are dumping US Treasuries and buying gold and silver like there’s no tomorrow. By the end of 2025, gold had officially overtaken US Treasuries as the world’s top foreign reserve asset, holding a 27% share, compared to 22% for Treasuries. The dollar is no longer “as good as gold,” and people want the real thing. Central banks are expected to buy at least 50 tons of gold every month this year, compared to 17 tons per month before the Ukraine War in 2022.

We are not Third-Worldists in the sense that we blame American workers for the exploitation of other countries’ people and resources. However, the quality of life Americans enjoyed for many decades, compared with their share of the world population, depended largely on the US-dominated architecture of the postwar world. That, and deficit spending, funded by the assumption that no one would ever seriously come to collect.

The US capitalists could afford to pass on a few extra crumbs from the table. That’s coming to a screeching halt. Not only can they not offer new crumbs, but they want to rip the old ones out of people’s mouths. This is a proverbial finished recipe for social unrest and, at a certain stage, revolution. It’s as simple as that.

De-dollarization is a two-way street. The Americans are actively pushing countries out of the dollar system by weaponizing it to bully them into submission.

It’s not necessarily that another currency will replace the dollar in the short term, but that more and more countries and companies are rerouting around the dollar and settling trade in their own currencies. For example, Russia now settles 98% of its trade transactions with SCO countries in their national currencies. At the recent BRICS summit, leaders adopted the New Delhi Declaration, which endorses a new cross-border payment system that circumvents the American- and European-dominated financial system. Trump’s predictable response was to threaten 100% tariffs on the bloc’s members for its “anti-American” stance.

The uncomfortable reality is that the dollar’s value has been steadily debased for decades and, like the threat of the US military, has been living off inertia. Big institutional investors are now betting against the US currency, just as they have done to other currencies over the decades.

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse

Let’s look briefly at four major factors that will continue to drive social and economic instability: debt, inflation, the bond market, and unemployment.

US debt has now surpassed $40 trillion and is accumulating faster than ever. To put this into perspective, it took from the time of Alexander Hamilton until 1981 to reach the first $1 trillion. In the 18 years since 2008, when the debt first hit $10 trillion, it has quadrupled.

After promising to cut government waste and spending, Trump has increased the debt more than any other president before him. All the “Big Beautiful Bill” really did was cut taxes and increase borrowing. To service the debt, the government has to pay over $1 trillion in interest alone every year—around 20% of total revenues. That’s $3 billion in public money paid every day to the banks and other lenders. According to the Congressional Budget Office, annual interest payments are expected to climb toward $2.1 trillion by 2036. And this is likely a conservative estimate, based on current conditions.

The US’s debt-to-GDP ratio is around 125%. Russia’s is around 16%. And yet we’re told it’s their economy that’s about to collapse.

To get back on the right side of this ratio, they either need to lower the debt or grow the GDP. But they’re spending more than ever, and GDP this year is expected to be just over 2%—barely enough to keep up with population growth.

There’s an old joke that if you owe the bank $10,000, you have a problem. But if you owe the bank $1,000,000, the bank has a problem. We might add that if the world is suffocating under a $300-trillion mountain of debt, the whole of humanity has a problem—unless and until we get rid of capitalism.

In 2008 and 2020, the US government printed money to prevent economic collapse and social unrest. The outcome was as predictable as it was inevitable: inflation. Now, with $40 trillion already owed to its creditors, there is little room for more “qualitative easing”—unless they go for broke out of desperation and let inflation run amok, which will have serious consequences.

As for inflation, for most people, what really matters is the relation between wages and prices. If wages are up 5% and inflation is up 2%, you’re doing better than yesterday. But if wages are up 5% and inflation is up 10%, you feel like you’re falling over an economic cliff. This is the essence of the cost-of-living crisis.

According to the Atlanta Fed, average wages are up, at best, 4.1% this year. But gasoline is up 50% since January. Diesel, which drives agriculture, trucking, cargo ships, emergency services, and heavy machinery, is up over 60% in a year and rising. Wheat is up 38%. Fertilizer is up at least 15%. AI chips face at least a 15% price hike. Beef roasts are up 13.5%, and tomatoes and apples have risen 12.8% and 11.1%, respectively.

The US isn’t the Weimar Republic yet, but Americans aren’t used to persistent inflation. Even double-digit inflation across the board would shatter expectations and feel like hyperinflation.

The threat of “stagflation” is also very real—weak economic growth or decline, combined with inflation, which could lead to an economic “doom loop” with no easy way out. The knock-on effects of all this could spiral out of control from one day to the next—such is the nature of capitalist crises. As an example, the much-vaunted AI build-out becomes even less viable than it already is if energy prices or interest rates rise too high.

So while Trump is pressuring the Federal Reserve not to raise interest rates, with the Consumer Price Index officially at 3.4%, they will eventually have to raise rates if they hope to tame inflation. But the end of relatively cheap money will also cascade across the economy.

Then there’s the question of US Treasury bonds. Although bonds are basically a loan to the US government, they are seen first and foremost as an investment. They are supposed to be a long-term, safe bet with low volatility, backed by what was long assumed to be the powerful entity on earth: the United States government. You get lower returns than you might get betting on the market, but at least you’re guaranteed a return.

However, yields have become so volatile that many investors are selling short‑term bonds and moving into longer‑term bonds to lock in higher yields—though they will dump those just as quickly if better opportunities appear. American treasuries are also competing with commodities futures, bond issues by other countries, and even private bonds put out by companies like Nvidia to keep the AI bonanza going.

All of this puts even more upward pressure on Treasury rates because the government must offer even higher interest to attract investors—another aspect of the “doom loop.” The stress on the bond market also makes mortgages more expensive and makes it costlier for businesses to borrow to cover expenses.

The slack demand reflects a crisis of confidence in the US government’s ability to raise money to cover its debts in the next 5 or 10 years, never mind the next 20 or 30. Who’s going to lend the US government money at 5.3% for 30 years given the crisis it finds itself in?

Scott Bessent was so desperate for a solution that he took a page from Wall Street’s playbook. Just as companies buy back their own stocks to artificially inflate prices, he used government money to buy back government bonds in the hopes of stabilizing yields. It was a massive flop: the sell-off resumed after a few hours, with rates surpassing pre-intervention levels. Instead of inspiring confidence, it sowed seeds of doubt.

And what’s Trump’s solution? Referring explicitly to countries that are selling off US bonds, he commented: “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.”

As for the serious bourgeois, David Kelly, the Chief Global Strategist at JPMorgan Funds, had this to say about Bessent’s impotent intervention:

It’s just moving around a bunch of borrowed money. That’s not going to move the needle. Unless they can find a way to truly change the trajectory on our debt, the government is powerless to stop this. We’ve maxed out the credit cards. The only foolproof way to get a major bond market rally is to have a massive recession. That would do it.

There it is, straight from a bourgeois strategist’s mouth. The capitalists have lived beyond their means, and now they expect us to pick up the tab. Recessions are an accepted and expected part of capitalism—never mind what they mean for millions of ordinary workers who have “played by the rules.”

A tsunami of good old-fashioned layoffs and home foreclosures is in the making. This is at a time when “functional unemployment” is already near 25%, and University of Michigan polling intimates that the country is already in a recession. The US has the lowest labor participation since 1976, which means the official unemployment rates are artificially low, since millions of working-age individuals aren’t even counted as part of the labor force.

47% of US wage workers have little to no discretionary income and couldn’t afford a $1,000 emergency. The median savings for American workers is $8,000, barely enough to maintain a family of four for a month.

In any case, why should people save when inflation outpaces interest rates on deposits, and when it’s all but guaranteed the things you need to buy will be even more expensive next month or next year? Quite a few Americans aren’t even sure the banks will be around in a few years: just 28% of respondents told Gallup they had a great deal of confidence in the banking system.

More and more people depend on credit cards or buy now, pay later options to make it to the next paycheck. Already, during Trump’s “Golden Age,” 13% of credit card balances were 90 days or more past due, and 69% of parents with young children are using buy now, pay later.

For many decades, capitalists succeeded in lowering the cost of producing the means of consumption by outsourcing to countries like China. Even though workers got a smaller share of the overall pie of social wealth, they got more “stuff,” which took the edge off life under the system. However, this too is coming to an end as deindustrialization, offshoring, trade wars, and inflation play out. One Jenga block after another is being pulled out of the wobbling tower of the American dream.

Ironically, the only “rational” explanation for this absurd circus is that they want to blow up the dollar and crash the world economy; that they’re aiming for a controlled demolition; that the only way out they can see is to flip the game board, thereby causing massive demand destruction. Perhaps they think this will bring down Russia and China, reduce the debt burden, and shock and awe the workers into submission, in the hopes they would come out on top of the rubble. Some conspiracy theorists even think they want civil unrest to justify calling out the military to crush internal dissent.

However, if all of this is rational, it only proves capitalism’s utter irrationality. Rather than believe this is a sophisticated game of trans-dimensional chess, the simplest explanation is that these people are slaves of history, which is consigning their system to the trash heap. Reality is rapidly catching up with the narrative, and in the long run, reality always wins.

Impacts on consciousness

Inevitably, all of this is transforming the consciousness of Americans of all classes. On the country’s 250th anniversary, just 33% of US adults say they are “extremely proud” to be an American, down 8% from last year.

25 years ago, after the attacks on September 11, it was more than double that. It’s easy to feel American pride when you feel like a victim and appear to be kicking ass. These days, the US is victimizing the world and is getting its ass kicked.

Incredibly, 28% of Americans say the Government/Congress/Politicians are the biggest problem facing the country—more than double the numbers for immigration, the economy, or inflation. The beginnings of an awakening class consciousness can be discerned in that figure.

Napoleon is credited with saying: “There is nothing more dangerous than an army of bayonets when they begin to think.”

Exacerbated by the debacle in Iran, the mood of discontent is clearly spreading rapidly into the armed services. Though not a conscript military, most uniformed personnel didn’t volunteer for this.

Despite the emphasis on the Air Force and air power, the US Navy has long been the most important arm of the US military for force projection, not to mention the most proletarian. Now it’s in serious trouble. It seems very likely that the sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln and other ships sabotaged their own vessels in protest against the miserable conditions they have been forced to face while waging an unpopular and unnecessary war. The anecdotes coming through about bad food, lack of resupply, extended deployments, low morale, depression, anger, and guilt over things like the Minab girls’ school bombing must be keeping the admirals up at night.

In a telling example of splits at the top, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll recently resigned in protest of Pete Hegseth’s running of the Department of War, and of the military as a whole, as service members and equipment are being pushed beyond their limits. A few months earlier, Driscoll ordered every officer and sergeant in the Army to personally check on the mental health of every soldier, every single day. The reason? The Army had lost 260 soldiers to suicide the year before—even before the latest senseless war. At least 80 generals and admirals have been fired, resigned, or refused promotion under Hegseth’s watch.

The military is pretty much the only major institution that has maintained consistently high approval ratings over the decades. However, if uniformed personnel’s confidence is in crisis, their families and the general public won’t be far behind. It took US imperialism a long time to overcome Vietnam Syndrome. It may never recover from Iran Syndrome.

Just as important are the splits at the bottom. The youth are sick of alienation and poverty when social media shows them a world awash with wealth and the potential for even more. The mood on the campuses this fall is seething with discontent and an unprecedented eagerness to get organized with the RCA.

Among the allegedly “apathetic” and “apolitical” youth, a distinct working-class consciousness is emerging. But this transformation is not limited to the youngest cohorts of workers. According to Pew research: “Working-class identification has ticked up from a few years ago: In 2024, 54% of Americans said the term described them well, and 60% do so today.”

The country’s overall unionization rate stands at just 10%, or around 14.7 million workers, with 32.9% of public-sector workers represented by a union, while private-sector workers are at a mere 5.9%. In 2025, 30 major work stoppages involved 1,000 or more workers and lasted at least one shift, idling 306,800 workers and marking a 13% increase in total worker participation compared to 2024. These are still very low rates compared to the 1930s or 1970s, but eventually, the percolating class consciousness will manifest in collective organizing in some form or another.

It flows from the above that the burgeoning class consciousness isn’t the result of inspiring class-struggle strikes or unionization campaigns. Rather, it is a function of millions’ experience of life under capitalism.

Despite the rotten-ripe potential for building unions and a working-class party, most union tops hide meekly in their class-collaborationist caves, despite their occasionally bold pronouncements. According to the UAW’s Shawn Fain: “Billionaires, in my opinion, don’t have a right to exist.” And yet, he has done virtually nothing to put his big words into practice. Nonetheless, he has proposed a general strike on May 1, 2028. That day will be here before we know it, and communists must keep it on our radar.

Crisis of the regime

All of this, in turn, has an impact on politics, which is the distilled essence of economics and class struggle.

The crisis of leadership, of the subjective factor, also applies to the ruling class. Trump is literally the best they could come up with—after Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris. After promising the moon, millions of 2024 Trump voters have buyer’s remorse. Just 32% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, a three-point drop from a month earlier.

The RNC’s first-ever midterm party convention—referred to by some as ”Trump-a-palooza”—did little to bolster his popularity beyond his most die-hard base. While roundly condemning “socialism” he also promised to give every American adult a $5,000 handout if the Republicans win the midterms. You won’t find such shameless attempted bribery even in a rural Mexican or Indonesian village.

 

MAGA support for the Iran war has fallen to 37%—down from 92% when the war started. With farmers and consumers being hammered by sanctions and rising diesel, gas, and fertilizer costs, it will only erode further. According to a July article in Politico, a person close to the White House says the mood is:

“At a maximum level of frustration right now,” with Trump “fully aware that the only way to the victory that he wants is completely politically impossible. The American people just will not support the kind of escalation it would take at this point. We’ve got more dead Americans and a politically impossible situation.”

Desperate for something to hold on to, Trump seeks to make socialism and communism the GOP’s new boogeyman—by which he means Democrats of any stripe. According to the President: “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

And yet, DSA candidates are making waves nationally, spurring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to re-up her membership after a seven-year lapse. The rise of a kind of populist left in the form of the liberal-socialist DSA Democrats is a classic, distorted example of workers striving to find a political expression within the limits of the two-party system. While this new iteration of DSA is in some ways less radical than the 2016–2018 version, it is nonetheless a significant symptom of the times.

Polymarket predicts the Democrats will sweep Congress in November, which would seal Trump’s political fate. It is by no means ruled out that, for one reason or another, Trump won’t finish his second term of office. Vance is clearly positioning himself as the Trumpism-without-Trump candidate, but Trump seems in no hurry to pass along his mantle.

However, if there is a “blue wave” in November, it will be despite, not because of the Democrats. There are deep wells of disgust and hatred for that ruling-class party as well, which offers no real solutions either. Far from embracing anything even approximating socialism, the first line of the party’s new “promise to America” declares: “We are capitalist, not socialist.”

As the joke goes, “no matter which party you vote for, you get John McCain.” Millions understand this, but nature abhors a vacuum, and someone has to get a majority of the votes. If and when the Democrats take Congress, we can be sure they will continue in the same vein as every other recent president, as they too cannot escape the gravitational pull of history.

On the other side of the spectrum—and if we’re being honest, far more bold, combative, and on some level even class-conscious—is the right-populist trio of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Joe Kent, who have announced a new political initiative. According to MTG: “Our commitment is America First for all Americans, right, left, and center.” Despite the nationalist edge, in a confused and distorted way, this, too, is a sign of growing class consciousness.

Polycrisis or revolution?

On top of all this, there’s the climate crisis with its fires, floods, the Super El Niño, and more. Not to mention the Epstein Files, shadow banks, ICE’s deportations, Greenland, and Trump’s moves against the “51st State” of Canada.

And just because US imperialism hasn’t managed to pivot cleanly to the Americas doesn’t mean it isn’t meddling and messing with the region, starting with Canada and Mexico. After their initial success in Venezuela, they have their eyes on Cuba and even Brazil, where they are moving might and main to bring back another Bolsonaro. Marco Rubio’s only real foreign policy interest is to dominate and humiliate Latin America—that, and dreaming of the presidency.

However, the region’s masses have deep revolutionary traditions. Despite the demoralizing betrayal of the Bolivarian Revolution, they will not allow their continent to become an enormous Epstein island. The whip of reaction will lead, at a certain stage, to renewed waves of revolution that will not respect the artificial borders of capitalism.

Adding to the pressure cooker, Social Security’s retirement trust fund reserves are expected to run out in late 2032, and only eye-watering austerity or dramatically higher taxes can address it. There’s a reason there is growing concern over coups, martial law, and civil war.

An Axios poll taken in late 2025 provides another snapshot of the incipient class consciousness:

• 89% of Americans believe they “are sacrificing too much of our privacy for the convenience and profit of big tech.”
• 76% think their “freedom of speech is being eroded away.”
• 73% believe the “government must do more to protect the civil and human rights of minorities.”
• 69% think “American democracy is under major threat now.”
• 63% believe “the government should do more to lessen income inequality in society.”
• 57% think “America is on the path to another Civil War.”

Under class society, peace is just a pause between wars. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, there were 65 state-based conflicts last year—the highest number of wars since 1946, and yet another data point pregnant with both reactionary and revolutionary implications. One or another imperialist power is directly or indirectly involved in every single one of them, profiting off the death and immiseration of the estimated two billion people living in regions affected by these conflicts.

Some of these could yet merge into all-out regional wars and possibly a worldwide conflagration. You don’t necessarily know you’re in a world war until you are. The Balkan Wars prefaced World War I, while Japan and Germany’s predations and America’s aspirations eventually metastasized into World War II.

It is not hyperbole to say that future generations may look back at this period as the slow-burn start of World War III. Whether it ever reaches this threshold or not, what we are clearly seeing is a worldwide inter-imperialist conflict as the up-and-coming imperialists seek to push the Americans back to their own hemisphere.

However, let us not forget that war is the midwife of revolution. Waves of social and political turmoil, wars of national liberation, and revolutions—including October 1917—transformed the world map and class relations.

This is what a “polycrisis” of insoluble contradictions looks like. Though we are not catastrophists, all signs point to an impending capitalist catastrophe. The bourgeoisie have exhausted all their main options for getting out of the next deep crisis, and all their roads lead to ruin. Another avalanche of suffering and humiliation is in store for the working class.

However, history wastes nothing. Next time won’t be a simple repeat of 2008 or 2020. A lot has happened since then, not least the George Floyd movement and the Minneapolis general strike.

The old world order is on its dying legs, and a new one is emerging. For now, it’s a reshuffling of the decks of the capitalist world order, which will mean more chaos and dislocation for the workers and the poor. But in that maelstrom, the forces that will overturn the capitalist world order once and for all are taking shape. The real meaning of the socialist revolution is increasingly concrete, not only for those of us already organized in the RCA, but for the hundreds of thousands who will join our ranks in the future.

When you live in a pressure cooker of class rage, you can feel in your bones that the 2030s are set to look a lot like the 1930s—on an even higher level. This imbues you with a sense of urgency. But precise predictions on the timing of events are devilishly difficult. We should avoid categorical prognostications and shouldn’t succumb to impatience if things take longer than we’d like. A decade or two is nothing on the scale of history, and besides, we need more time to prepare.

In the panicked words of Tucker Carlson—who hopes to see the system he defends continue into the next century: “I’m not for revolution, but we’re gonna get a revolution if we don’t readjust a bit, soon.”

We, the comrades of the RCA, are for a revolution—the socialist revolution—and we are doing our utmost to ensure its victory in our lifetime.