President of the US empire, Donald Trump, presents an executive order during his inaugural parade, January 20, 2025. Photo: Reuters/Carlos Barria.
By Atilio Boron – Jan 22, 2025
Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the signals he sent from the moment of his inauguration (which continued late into the night at the unexpected press conference that took place in the Oval Office) were tinged with an alarming mixture of arrogance and overconfidence. If anyone still doubts that the United States is the center of an empire, the show put on by the New York tycoon dispels all doubts. But the radical nature of his proposals and his verbiage express, better than anything else, the harsh reality that US imperialism is experiencing an inexorable decline.
This is not a subject that the hegemonic media and the parties of the ruling plutocracy usually talk about, except in hermetic conclaves when the imperial administrators cannot lie to each other. They know that the great world chessboard, to use Zbigniew Brzezinski’s graphic image, has changed and that with the illusion of eternal unipolarity that would characterize the entire 21st century—“the American Century”—vanished, what remains is the laborious construction of a damage limitation strategy to preserve something of the once uncontested hegemony in an international arena characterized by the insurgence of new players in global economy and politics.
Trump’s campaign slogan since 2016, MAGA, reveals this need for the United States to be great again, a tacit confession that, even though it is still an enormously important actor—especially in the military arena—it no longer has the omnipotence it had in the past. China, the main commercial or financial partner of almost one hundred and fifty countries, is undoubtedly the power that sets the pace of the world economy and the planet’s industrial workshop. Russia has risen from the ashes and the almost twenty thousand unilateral coercive measures taken by Washington, especially after the outbreak of war with Ukraine, have had a paradoxical effect: its economy is the fastest growing in Europe, well above Germany, France and the United Kingdom. And, even more importantly, Moscow said goodbye to Europe, producing, together with China and India, its partners in the BRICS, a significant reorientation of the world economy. The original BRICS, not counting the new countries that have recently joined, already surpass the G7 countries in terms of economic output and the projections for the next five years are even more encouraging. Trump plans to fight them with tariffs and duties, but that will only deepen inflationary pressures within the United States.
In this new terrain, where Trump has made all kinds of threats, the White House will also have to deal with the technological backwardness of its country, especially in relation to the formidable progress of China in the broad field of computing, robotics and the so-called “computer sciences,” a topic that was underlined in the memorable speech that Jimmy Carter gave at the Sunday school of the Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, in April 2021. He said that “in the 242 years of its existence, the United States has only been at peace for 16 years. Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with someone? None.” And he concluded: “we have wasted some 3 trillion dollars on military spending instead of investing it, as China did, in technological and scientific developments, and that is why they have taken the lead.”
The obsession with China had clear repercussions for Latin America and the Caribbean. The threat to take back the Panama Canal for the United States because “we gave it to Panama and not to China” reveals a lack of knowledge of the current reality and of the long negotiations that culminated in the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which guaranteed the neutrality of that waterway but also Panamanian control of the Canal. The attempt to sanction countries and ships that operate in the Peruvian mega-port of Chancay, built by the Chinese and operated by a Chinese state-owned company, Cosco Shipping, in association with a Peruvian company linked to mining, is another example of this.
China’s commercial projection in the Arctic, as well as Russia’s military one, precipitated the claim to buy Greenland, which was responded to with an undignified response, due to its groveling, by the Danish government. More serious has been the insinuation that he would designate the Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, which according to US legislation (in violation of international law) arrogates the extraterritoriality of its jurisdiction and could give rise to an armed attack on Mexican territory. Or the desire to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and militarize the southern border, which would cause a severe economic crisis in states such as California and Texas, to name just two, and a humanitarian crisis of major proportions on both sides of the Rio Grande.
The word “invasion” used to describe the entry of migrants, and his description of them as “criminals, drug traffickers and rapists” reveal the profile of a xenophobic and racist character, as well as a misogynist, homophobic and deeply authoritarian one. He already showed this face of his character in his first term, but then he had an environment that partly moderated these aggressive impulses. Not today. Marco Rubio is a man consumed by his hatred of Cuba and its revolution, just like Mauricio Claver-Carone. His cabinet is dominated by hawks, the hucksters of the military-industrial complex, financial crooks and diehard supporters of Zionism. It was no coincidence that at the ceremony at the One Arena there was a delegation of relatives of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. On the other hand, there was absolutely no one representing the more than fifty thousand deaths caused by the genocide unleashed by the Israeli government. Finally, in his immediate circle of advisors and officials, there are thirteen billionaires, starting with Elon Musk, an admirer of the German neo-Nazi party who just yesterday saluted the crowd with a Hitler salute. There is no precedent for such a significant downgrade in the history of the US democracy.
There was a striking silence regarding Cuba and Venezuela, although it was clear that one of the first decisions he would make as soon as he was sworn in as president would be to reintroduce the largest of the Antilles to the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, an unspeakable infamy only understandable in the light of the bicentennial US aspiration to take over the island of Cuba. Regarding Venezuela, he said that the United States does not need the South American country’s oil because they, US nationals, have even more oil and are going to extract and export it. There he will have several problems because there are six states, including California and New York, where fracking is banned.
In an arrogant tone he said he is not worried about Latin America because he made the crude error of saying that “they need us, but we don’t need them,” so he expects their governments to accept whatever Washington decides without question. In short, there would be many more issues to analyze in a bombastic, foundational (“today is Liberation Day,” he said), warmongering speech, where he proudly announced that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change and also from the World Health Organization (WHO). You don’t have to be a fortune teller to predict that as soon as he has to move from words to deeds, the obstacles he will encounter in that change [of approach] will be formidable, both inside and, above all, outside the United States because, despite the conservative right and the colonized spirits that abound in Latin America, the structure of world power has changed and that transition, now complete, is irreversible.
Trump can continue to make his threats and continue with his denial of climate change while a dreadful fire destroys part of Los Angeles, which should force Trump and the techno-feudal barons who accompany him to seriously reflect on climate change. But they won’t. We must prepare for very hard times, not only in Latin America and the Caribbean; but all over the world.
Translation: Resumen Latinoamericano with Orinoco Tribune additional editing
Atilio Borón
Atilio A. Borón is a Harvard Graduate professor of political theory at the University of Buenos Aires and was executive secretary of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). He has published widely in several languages a variety of books and articles on political theory and philosophy, social theory, and comparative studies on the capitalist development in the periphery. He is an international analyst, writer and journalist and profoundly Latinoamerican.
