“The lust and the avarice
The bottomless, the cavernous
greed”
– Natalie Merchant (‘Motherland’).
“One thing about us wise guys, the hustle never ends.” – Tony Soprano.
Overview
This article takes as its starting point the U.S. attacks on Venezuela and Iran in early 2026. Both attacks, it is argued, demonstrated distinguishing characteristics of the Trump administration: greed, short-termism, incompetence, and an obsession with violent, egotistical gestures rather than strategic calculation. Trump does not pursue any version of the U.S. national interest. Nor does he consistently pursue the long-term interests of the U.S. ruling class and its empire, though the regime is backed by members of the ruling class who share its penchants for short-term gain and narcissistic gratification. The upshot is a decline in U.S. hegemony in the world and a boost to the ambitions of China and other powers.
Introduction
The U.S. government launched two unprovoked acts of military aggression in early 2026. The first, in January, saw U.S. forces violently kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and first lady Celia Flores and bring them to the U.S. to face spurious charges of drug trafficking; the new head of state (the former vice-president) accepted the Trump administration’s demands to open Venezuela up to U.S. capital, assume liability for past corporate claims made against the state, and bow to U.S. oversight of how the country’s oil revenues would be managed. The action was protested worldwide but sparked no serious retaliation from other governments. On its own terms, this seemed a clear victory for the U.S. empire.
The second act of aggression, begun in February, saw the U.S. and Israel launch a massive military campaign against Iran, a war that quickly escalated into a colossally expensive catastrophe in human, environmental and financial terms. Despite the current impasse in negotiations following a ceasefire, it is hard to dispute Owen Jones’ verdict when he describes Trump’s “excursion” as “the biggest strategic defeat suffered by the U.S. since its emergence as a superpower”. This assessment is widely held. Ryan Cooper calls it “an immense strategic defeat – and one that knocks the legs out from under the entire American system of power projection and global predominance”. Iran proved its ability to wreak military and economic havoc on the U.S. and its allies.
Current fragile ceasefire negotiations are based on U.S. willingness to at least discuss Iranian proposals: these include the removal of U.S. military bases from the Middle East and continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, possibly including tolls continuing to be imposed on ships transiting through the marine passageway. The very fact that such issues are even on the table – they would not have been up for discussion before the war – represents a decisive advance for Iran and a huge blow to the U.S. Veteran US diplomat Richard Haass concedes that in strategic terms the US is losing the war,
This article will argue that, despite their seemingly different outcomes, the two aggressions shared certain characteristics associated with the Trump presidency: greed, narcissism, short-termism, limited ambition (in terms of regime change or even resource access), incompetence and incoherence. Not all of these characteristics are unique to this presidency but the salience and intensity of the regime’s avarice and egomania – its hustle and hubris – distinguish it from past U.S. regimes while undermining long-term U.S. imperial ambitions.
Few dispute that the attack on Iran starkly illustrated the limits of the U.S. empire (at least in its current Trumpian incarnation) but so also, in a different way, did the attack on Venezuela. Because Venezuela is more likely to be seen as a relative success for U.S. imperialism, greater space is devoted here to that intervention to argue that, contrary to initial appearances, this was a strictly limited and globally insignificant “triumph”. This is followed with a discussion of the broader pattern of greed and ego now undermining U.S. empire and of how that has worked to the benefit of China in particular. But we begin with an outline of why both mainstream and left-wing commentators typically misunderstand the nature of Trump’s presidency.
Category errors and kleptocracy
The Trumpian state
Explanations for why the U.S. administration chose to wage its war on Iran include: a strategic desire to eliminate or weaken the main supposed rival to U.S. control of the Middle East and its oil, and to control or limit the supply of that oil to China especially; deference to Israel’s quest for total domination of the region (a quest that is continuing as Israel seeks to sabotage the ceasefire and continues aggressions in Palestine and Lebanon); and Trump’s wish to distract from the Epstein files and the cost of living crisis in the U.S. (though of course the war worsened that crisis).
All these factors may have played some role. However, writing in the U.S. establishment insider journal Foreign Affairs before this latest assault on Iran, a distinctive, simple and useful frame for viewing the actions of the Trump regime is proposed by Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nixon:
“Trump has… wielded U.S. foreign policy principally to increase his own wealth, bolster his status, and personally benefit a small circle of his family members, friends, and loyalists. U.S. foreign policy is now largely subordinate to the private interests of the president and his retainers.”
Cooley and Nixon criticize other scholars for committing a “category error” (assigning to something a quality it does not possess) and continuing to believe that Trump 2.0 is pursuing (even if poorly) anything resembling the U.S. national interest or that his regime is adopting a classically realist approach to foreign affairs to which his blatant corruption is merely a sideshow.
On the contrary, they argue, in a kleptocratic system like that of Trump, “corruption is the end; the point of holding and keeping office is to enrich a ruler and his inner circle. Regulation, law enforcement, public procurement, and even diplomacy all become means of self-dealing – of extracting resources, controlling streams of income, and diverting wealth to family, friends, and allies”. Cooley and Nixon urge their fellow academics to “stop obfuscating the reality of Trump’s foreign policy by calling it realism… [or] great-power competition.”
Paul Heideman makes a similar case from a different political perspective, one that is not nostalgic for prior periods of U.S. foreign policy (he references the “bloodbaths in Vietnam and Iraq”) but that also recognizes the distinctiveness of Trump’s regime. Heideman locates Trump within the longstanding trend of the Republican Party (and perhaps U.S. party politics more broadly) becoming “unmoored from the control of America’s capitalist class as a whole”. While individual capitalists and sectors exert influence, there is no longer “the kind of class-wide oversight that the foreign policy planning network was designed to provide” – to both Republican and Democrat administrations.
Dismantling the foreign policy network
This planning network, Heideman outlines, operated through corporate-sponsored think tanks that produced advisory reports for U.S. governments and supplied many of the personnel who staffed those governments’ foreign policy departments. The classic example is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, which publishes Foreign Affairs): for example, Condoleezza Rice, George W Bush’s national security advisor, was a CFR fellow while Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State under Biden, was a CFR member; there are myriad other examples. Crucially, the boards of such think tanks bring together representatives of different corporations from different economic sectors, thereby facilitating, in theory at least, the forging of a shared ruling class perspective that has been operationalized through the deployment of think tank personnel within successive administrations. The think tanks thus constitute what Alex Callinicos defines as fora in which “collective [class] actors constitute themselves and articulate their claims”.
Some such personnel (albeit fewer than under previous administrations) continued to occupy key positions under Trump 1.0, but Trump 2.0 has changed that radically: there has been, in Susan Watkins’ words, a “gutting [of] the senior levels of the National Security Council and State Department”, with critical foreign policy roles now more likely to be occupied by people drawn from the worlds of TV and real estate. A military studies professor visiting Washington in March 2026 and nostalgic for the old order has written despairingly:
“It is hard to convey the gloom that has overtaken Washington. All the structures that are vital to crisis management [read: war planning] have either been attenuated or disbanded. There is hardly anyone left on the National Security Council staff. A friend described an empty State Department where you could hear your own footsteps.”
Those foreign policy think tanks that are now influential, unlike the CFR, tend to be aggressively focused ones of recent creation, such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, an Israeli lobbying body with which Secretary of State Marco Rubio is particularly associated, and the equally pro-Israeli Vandenberg Coalition that lobbied hard for attacking Iran. Much has been made of the radical conservative Heritage Foundation’s influence on Trump through its Project 2025 agenda for his presidency. That influence is indeed evident in a number of policy areas, including: centralizing power within the Executive; working against Trans rights, ‘gender ideology’, and ‘wokeness’ more generally; attacking public service media, university and judicial independence; oppression and deportation of anyone deemed undesirable; the attempted limitation of citizenship and voting rights; and shredding the civil service, especially as regards corporate regulation and workers’ rights. But its influence over foreign policy is open to debate.
Heritage did support the weeding out of the network of foreign policy “professionals” that had previously dominated in this area (a former Obama speechwriter called them the “blob”). High-ranking military officers are also being purged, with nine 4- and 5-star military personnel fired during Trump 2.0 – compared to eleven over the entire previous 160 years. Those fired include: the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Staff of the Army, the Chief of Staff of the Navy, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the Secretary of the Navy, and the leaders of intelligence agencies. One result is that decisions now get made by, as Heideman contends, a “staggeringly incompetent policy team”, with the particular ignorance and ineptitude of Trump golf buddy and ubiquitous special representative Steve Witkoff singled out by some. Witkoff has been central to deliberations concerning Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere.
Incompetence is certainly evident in the ongoing debacle of the U.S. assault on Iran, characterized as it is by: unclear and shifting goals; failure to rally, or even prepare to rally, external support; insufficient stockpiles of military assets and of the raw materials necessary to replace them; and the prior decommissioning of minesweepers. The Trump regime’s underestimation of the strength of Iranian resistance is an acute symptom of this incompetence – especially Iran’s willingness and capacity to attack Gulf states (and U.S. bases therein, as well as data centers) and to close the Strait of Hormuz, throwing the global economy into chaos and peril, not just through pushing up oil and gas prices but also through wider commodity price shocks and impacts on global supply chains. Within the region itself, thirty to forty percent of Gulf refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed and it may take up to three years to fully restore it. Experienced military leaders’ words of caution on some or all of these matters continue to be ignored or overridden.
Left misconceptions
The ruling class and the state
The category error identified by Cooley and Nixon, and implied by Heideman, can also apply to left-wing writers, who tend to look to Trump as espousing, not the interests of the U.S. as a whole, but the interests of the U.S. ruling class and US imperialism. A common variant is to see Trump as a representative of an aspirant unilateral, muscular new order (in line with Heritage’s Project 2025 agenda), shedding the constraints of the old, multilateral, rules-based system (I’ve gone some way down that road myself in the past). The military assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and first lady, together with the transformation of the rump Venezuelan regime into a U.S. vassal state, might seem, at first glance, a good example of this unilateral approach in successful action but, as will be shown, this is not really the case.
What I term left-wing category errors, with particular but not exclusive reference to Venezuela, include the following:
- Brian O’Boyle stating that “Trump’s MAGA project is designed to reassert the power of a declining hegemon… to make the world “great again” for the U.S. ruling class”. Vis-à-vis the attack on Venezuela, the U.S. ruling class, O’Boyle writes, has made a “calculation that the U.S. can reassert control over an important continent [South America], capture some much needed resources and weaken the role of China in the region.” O’Boyle concludes that Trump’s programme “represents a brutal ruling class turning to ever more brutal tactics to secure their own interests.”
- Referring to continental policy more generally, Susan Watkins concurring: “In Latin America [Trump] is defending and extending the capitalist system against hold-out leftist regimes, and so advancing American economic, political and ideological interests.“
- William Camarco and Frederick Mills crediting the Trump regime with “a strategic project whose assault on Venezuela has broader geopolitical implications”.
- Logan McMillen going so far as to attribute to Trump “a coherent project of global enclosure” in relation to both Venezuela and Iran.
- Charlie Lywood attributing Trump’s (now perhaps paused) drive to take over Greenland to the U.S.’s desire, in the context of imperial rivalry with China in particular, to access rare earths (minerals vital for large swatches of industry, discussed further below) and to assure domination of new navigation routes opened up by shrinking Arctic ice.
- Guy Laron interpreting Trump’s attacks on Venezuela and Iran as strategic responses to China’s near-monopoly of rare earths, creating countervailing leverage over China by controlling its access to the discounted, sanctions-busting oil previously supplied to China by both Venezuela and Iran (though he concedes that, taken together, the two countries only accounted for 17-18 per cent of Chinese oil imports in 2025).
These claims rest on two assumptions: first, that there is a cohesive U.S. ruling capitalist class capable of making such calculations and agreeing on such tactics and, second, that the U.S. state serves as the agent of that class. Both assumptions are questionable.
On the issue of class cohesion, Doug Henwood (writing in 2021) has documented the growing fractures and frictions within U.S. capital, leading to what Salar Mohandesi describes as a lack of a “coherent global vision” on the part of the ruling class. In his book Rogue Elephant, Heideman documents how the U.S. ruling class only adopted a substantively common policy in the 1970s and 1980s when the labor movement was winning concessions from capital amidst falling rates of profit and a concerted fightback was seen as essential, the fightback becoming the global turn to neoliberalism. Once neoliberalism had done its job of disciplining labor and restoring or extending capital’s privileges, Heideman argues, U.S. corporations regressed to individual and sectoral lobbying.
The kleptocratic state
On the issue of who the state serves, Trump, to a greater extent than any U.S. president in the modern era, clearly pursues policies (and Cooley and Nixon are right about this) that are of direct, personal benefit to himself – primarily materially, but also in the sense of feeding a narcissistic ego (Melvin Goodman refers to his “extreme obsession with power, wealth, and self-importance”). This applies most recently to the war on Iran: there is strong circumstantial evidence that regime insiders were making stock and commodity market killings, as well as profiteering through event prediction platforms, by virtue of advance access to Trump’s market-shifting statements on the war. For example, a suspicious number of one-way bets on falling oil prices were made just before Trump claimed negotiations to end the war had been initiated, while large bets on a ceasefire were being made just before Trump announced it on April 7, 2026.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy (himself a blowhard warmonger) decries this as “mind-blowing corruption”, while economist Paul Krugman baldly states that people “close to Trump are trading based on national secrets” and that this amounts to treason. Trump is not alone in this: the Financial Times reports that a financial broker for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth sought to buy shares worth millions of dollars in armaments companies before the war commenced. The war may not have been started to facilitate such shenanigans but it was gleefully exploited for those ends. (Oil companies also made windfall gains from higher prices, a topic we will return to).
David Kirkpatrick estimates that this presidency has already been leveraged to ensure that Trump and his family have grossed over $4 billion. (There is an irony in the fact that a man whose business acumen was always a myth has finally found a sure-fire way of making vast amounts of money). That he does not always achieve his more ego-based goals (even when he thinks he has, as has proven the case in Iran) is not the point, which is that neither he nor the regime he dominates is a reliable representative of any fraction of U.S. capital beyond his own business interests and, to an extent, those of the “patronage system of oligarchs” (John Feffer’s phrase) assembled for the purposes of tribute extraction in return for governmental favors (such as rolling back regulation of AI and crypto).
One can interpret the resistance on the part of the US Supreme Court to Trump’s attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve as an attempt to re-impose some unified ruling class interests on the presidency – a central bank that is independent of democratic oversight but attentive to the needs of neoliberal financial capital serves the needs of the overall capitalist order, not just particular electoral ambitions or regime cronies at a point in time. Trump’s hostility to that independence reflects his lack of concern for the welfare and stability of the system as a whole when it conflicts with his personal agenda
Of course the actions of previous U.S. regimes were also partly driven by the corrupt motivations of key actors (Cooley and Nixon elide this history). To take just one example, Vice-President Dick Cheney, serving under President George W. Bush, spearheaded the 2003 invasion of Iraq and saw a firm in which he had substantial interests – Halliburton – profit enormously, as Jeffrey St. Clair has documented, from no-bid, billion-dollar government contracts (rife with fraud and overcharging) for the supposed reconstruction of Iraq.
But Cheney’s greed and graft can be argued to have largely overlapped with the objectives of U.S. imperialism in controlling Middle East oil and the region more generally – U.S. and other Western oil companies previously shut out of the Iraqi market were able to re-enter (they are still there, albeit non-US companies now dominate), launch major new fields and reap massive profits. This happened at a time before the U.S. itself was transformed, through the exploitation of shale oil and liquefied natural gas, into a much more significant oil and gas producer.. This does not mean the Iraq war was a simple “war for oil” – Matt Huber highlights other factors, especially the perceived and straightforward need to demonstrate US capacity for hard power projection after 9/11 – but the initiation of new oil projects was, at the very least, a bonus.
No such convergence of interests can be assumed in the case of Trump and Venezuela. This argument may seem counterintuitive: does not Trump’s seizure of Venezuela’s president and its oil mark a logical and successful (for now) strengthening of U.S. corporate profits and imperial power? It can even be seen as a counter-example to the Iran war debacle. The issue is given added force by the claim that Venezuela possesses the world’s largest untapped oil reserves, potentially making it even more strategically significant than Iraq.
It is true that there is far more continuity in U.S. foreign policy than is sometimes acknowledged (again, the insistence of Cooley and Nixon on Trump’s claimed uniqueness in this regard is misplaced), especially when it comes to brutal military interventions abroad. But whether the control of Venezuelan oil is or was of particular value to U.S. capital, even to U.S. oil companies, is moot – it is certainly of limited value in the United States’ imperial rivalry with China or anyone else.
Venezuela and limited U.S. ambitions in Latin America
The Venezuela heist
Venezuela presents an important test case for the argument that Trump does not seriously promote the interests of U.S. capital and empire. The intervention there is so commonly seen as advancing precisely those interests, whereas the aggression on Iran is already widely seen (including by many Foreign Affairs contributors) to have been a stupid and counterproductive failure, as well as a human and environmental catastrophe. In fact, far from demonstrating a rational, clear-eyed and successful resolve on the part of the U.S. ruling class and the U.S. state to shed multilateral constraints and directly achieve their core objectives, Venezuela reveals a pattern (equally evident vis-à-vis Iran) of short-term thinking, exaggerated claims, kleptocracy and the prioritization of violent photo-opportunities over substance.
In the first place John Ganz argues that Trump’s demands for U.S. companies to invest in Venezuela are unlikely to yield much return:
“Most oil companies today are not inclined toward large-scale production investments; they prefer to hoard cash and limit exposure. There are also internal tensions within the industry: the United States is now a major oil producer, and domestic producers have little incentive to finance projects that would undercut their own prices. Asking US oil interests to invest capital in Venezuela in order to depress global prices is, from their perspective, an irrational proposition.”
High oil and gas prices are good for fossil fuel companies, as was seen in 2022 as the outbreak of the war in Ukraine constricted supplies and the companies’ profits rose substantially. They also made windfall profits from the price rises engendered by the war on Iran. Why then did the share prices of those firms rise after the assault on Venezuela, the exploitation of whose largely untapped reserves might have been expected to depress prices? Most likely, Matt Huber suggests, because there was an expectation that a new (or newly disciplined) Venezuelan government would finally deliver to the companies compensation for property and investments expropriated or stymied due to past nationalizations and state restrictions.
There is certainly money to be made here, largely because the system of investor-state dispute settlement courts privileges corporate claims against governments. To take just one of many examples, oil company ConocoPhillips won nearly $9 billion in a World Bank arbitration court ruling against the Venezuelan government in 2019 (the company claims to be owed a total of $12 billion) with Trump reportedly promising that they would get much (if perhaps not all) of “their” money back.
These are non-trivial sums (and it would be surprising if Trump was not seeking a cut from any such payouts), but they do not presage large-scale investment in, and rehabilitation of, the Venezuelan oil industry. Low investment over past decades and associated infrastructural decay, partly the result of U.S. sanctions (these extend well beyond the oil sector alone), has left the industry in a sorry state. Bringing production back up to historical highs, even if it suited U.S. companies to do so, would demand at least a decade of large and steady investment, as well as overcoming the constraints posed by a shortage of essential dilutants. (If the ruinous environmental cost of all this was to be properly priced in then the bill would be even higher, but we can assume the oil industry is unconcerned with that).
Chris Morlock forecasts that:
“What’s actually lined up for Venezuela is not extraction, but asset stripping. The firms positioned to “re-enter”Venezuela are overwhelmingly financial, not productive. Asset managers like BlackRock are positioned to absorb distressed sovereign and PDVSA [Venezuelan state oil company]-linked debt, restructure it, and turn future production into collateral streams rather than national revenue. U.S. and European oil majors are waiting not to build capacity but for production-sharing agreements, arbitration rulings, and debt-for-equity swaps that cap output and guarantee rents.”
An output cap would avert the threat of lowered prices reducing the profitability of existing production, especially in the U.S. Trump may, as Brian O’Boyle argues, want “cheap energy to bring down the costs for ordinary Americans” (though his Iran war did the opposite), but it is not what the oil industry wants and it is likely not what consumers are going to get. And it is not as if Trump cares that much for U.S. consumers: his tariffs cost the average household $1,000 last year. This is all, of course, an outrageous rip-off of Venezuelans: the US has stolen stocks of Venezuelan oil, is selling it and placing the returns in Qatari bank accounts, while telling Venezuela what it can and cannot do with its share.
But this thievery does not equate to the transformational investment and output surge Trump has bloviated about, and, from the point of view of geopolitical rivalry, it does not give the U.S. any substantial new leverage over China, which has limited dependence on Venezuelan oil – just 4 per cent of Chinese oil imports last year came from Venezuela (albeit that was 61 per cent of all Venezuelan oil). Likewise Trump’s claim that India will substitute Venezuelan for Russian energy is probably hype.
Shields, caveats and cinematic action
Cuba is severely threatened by the U.S. blocking its access to existing Venezuelan production, and by fresh US sanctions, and this constitutes another crime, but it is, sadly, of limited geopolitical significance (despite the potential political win it offers to the anti-Cuba zealots within the U.S. administration). If, as Susan Watkins suggests, “Cuba is the prize” then that only betrays the U.S. regime’s limited geopolitical ambitions. Trump’s new Shield of the Americas grouping of right-wing Latin American and Caribbean leaders, seemingly an indication of wider ambitions, got off to an inauspicious start at the inaugural summit in March 2026 when Trump told the leaders that he did not have time to learn their “damn language” while Secretary of War Hegseth proclaimed that he only spoke “American”. These leaders can swallow the insults and have no problem backing regime change in Caracas and Havana, and facilitating the gung-ho U.S. mass murder of people on fishing boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific by claiming they were targeting narco cartels, especially when they serve to bolster the authoritarian reach of regimes like that of Ecuador. But that is as far as it goes.
Limited measures like forcing a Chinese port company out of the Panama Canal and restrictions on Chinese firms operating in Venezuela itself notwithstanding, the odds are long that most Latin American countries will significantly limit Chinese influence in their countries when Chinese trade and investment is crucial for even the hard right governments of Argentina and El Salvador. The so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’, a supposed update of the Monroe Doctrine that sought to block rival powers to the U.S. from enjoying influence in the Western hemisphere, is accurately described by Jared O Bell as “foreign policy as performance, driven by spectacle and attention rather than strategy or governance”. It is not, in other words, a serious imperialist project.
Is geopolitical significance rescued by the fact that seizing Venezuelan oil ensures its sale (in whatever quantities) will be denominated in dollars? Since 2018 Venezuela had been selling oil to China denominated in renminbi, thus arguably threatening the dollar’s seigniorage position in the global economy, which obliges other countries to fund the U.S. trade deficits and debt by acquiring dollars. The attack on Venezuela might be seen as an attempt to nip such threats in the bud. But, again, this makes little sense as an erratic and aggressive U.S. is only encouraging countries, including those in the EU, to hedge against the dollar and transact more business in other currencies, as well as to hold a greater proportion of their reserves in non-dollar form. Ironically, Trump’s own promotion of crypto currencies potentially further erodes dollar hegemony
The dollar, as Costas Lapavitsas shows, remains the dominant world currency but the assault on Venezuela did that dominance no favors. The war on Iran has done it even fewer favors – as Iran accepted payment in renminbi/yuan for passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the Bloomberg financial news agency first posited the rise of the petroyuan as a serious alternative to the petrodollar, while later concluding even more dramatically that “The Iran war just broke the petrodollar”.
Caveats with regard to Venezuela are, to be fair, in order. One is that critical raw materials other than oil (including rare earths, 17 metallic elements that are deployed in everything from smartphones and wind turbines to military hardware) that lie underneath Venezuelan soil are of interest to the U.S., though access to these could easily have been negotiated with the Venezuelan government without the need for military intervention.
A second caveat is that Chevron, of all the oil majors, might well boost its production and launch new ventures in Venezuela because it is the one U.S. company that still has significant capital and infrastructure already embedded in the country.
A third caveat is that the industry players may be protesting too much, exaggerating the difficulty of operating in Venezuela in order to build a stronger case for government support. The U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM) is in the process of being tapped for such support in the form of export credit guarantees that would minimize the risk for oil companies entering or re-entering Venezuela. The risk, as per the neoliberal playbook, would be transferred to the U.S. taxpayer. Still, even extensive state incentives are unlikely to prompt the companies to produce in such quantities as to undercut their prices and profit margins.
It is, in summary, difficult to see the assault on Venezuela as a truly serious attempt to open up new investment opportunities and substantively combat rivals such as China. What then did drive Trump’s actions? Greed, as Cooley and Nixon would predict, surely plays a key role. Some of the proceeds of Venezuelan oil sales will doubtless flow into Trump Inc’s pockets (funneling the revenues through Qatar hardly instils hope of transparency), and so, in all probability, will pay-offs from those corporations that succeed in collecting arbitration judgements against the Venezuelan state. Even if it were fully feasible, the development of Venezuela’s massive oil reserves is a long-term project that would be of little interest to a president obsessed with quick, large paybacks and immediate, lavish praise.
As Robert Kuttner observes, “Trump’s trademark is abrupt violent action that plays well on TV” (he probably thought that would also apply when attacking Iran). Or, in the words of John Ganz again:
“Ultimately, I think it’s worth looking at the whole episode from a propaganda standpoint. As Trump himself would likely put it, the invasion of Venezuela looked cinematic: clean, tactically impressive, and visually compelling. This is the model they seem intent on repeating – producing discrete tactical vignettes that look powerful and decisive to their audience. This is precisely what many American reactionaries fantasize about.”
Is it what members of the U.S. ruling class (however unified or fractured) fantasize about? At a personal level doubtless some of them do, but is this type of regime behavior in their interests as a class? What Trump has done in Venezuela certainly does not run contrary to their short-term interests – some (financial vulture funds, the oil majors at the margin) will make money, others (like the powerful tech barons) will be more or less unaffected. But it hardly represents a serious class project i.e., part of a concerted attempt to advance the long-term interests of U.S. capital over and against rival powers and interests. Cooley and Nixon are right to characterise Trump’s regime as kleptocratic, not strategic.
Greed, grievance and perversity
Loot and narcissism
The reality of Trump 2.0 is that, in all probability and for the most part, there is no strategy – at least not a national one, and not a coherent class one either. Rather, there is just a scatter-gun set of actions, many reversed or abandoned, designed to immediately gratify, materially and psychologically. What we have, in the words of Farrel Corcoran, is “a massive agglomeration of rackets and scams led by a racketeer-in-chief”, who also wildly pursues ego-boosting adventures. One glaring example of the rackets in action is Trump’s decision to allow Japanese Nippon Steel take over U.S. Steel, in exchange for Trump being granted a so-called golden share, allowing him veto power over investment plans and other board decisions; to be clear, this share went to Trump personally, not to the US government.
Of course within the administration there are factions pursuing different agendas – from a return to “sensible” liberal imperialism, to a sustained focus on combatting China (see below), to full-blown fascism (which some in the leadership lean towards but hopefully lack the coherence and ambition to thoroughly implement). But the overarching theme and the bottom line are best characterized as corruption and egomania.
Trump prizes loot, fawning tributes (witness the way in which cabinet members and visiting foreign leaders have to feed what Goodman terms his “pathological narcissism” by lavishing praise upon him, his obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize, and his placing his own image and signature on newly issued currency), and the settling of personal grudges. From the point of view of the empire, the approach is almost certainly perverse; Ryan Cooper goes so far as to christen Trump the “wrecker of American empire”. Or, as Rafael Behr puts it, “Making Trump feel great is the undoing of American greatness” (though greatness is not really the right word).
Trump has unnecessarily alienated Western allies (even some on the far right, who have noted how Trump’s endorsement did Orban no favors in the Hungarian election ), themselves hypocrites who drew the line at threats to Greenland but backed the genocide in Gaza. They were still mostly prepared, initially at least, to back the U.S. attack on Iran before retreating when their help was demanded reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s push to acquire Greenland may have itself been driven by greed – long-time crony Ronald Lauder has extensive business interests there, with Bezos and Zuckerberg amongst the many others with eyes on what wealth can be extracted from the territory, as well as dreams of establishing libertarian techno-cities.
As mentioned earlier, left-wing writers tend to attribute the Greenland gambit to an imperial desire to access rare earths and other critical minerals, and to take advantage of navigation routes newly developed by diminishing Arctic ice. These are understandable goals from the point of view of U.S. imperialism, and a global race for critical raw materials is certainly ongoing, but was Trump’s petulant demand for ownership a rational means of pursuing those goals? The resources and the routes could have been secured through negotiations that would not have so alienated hitherto staunch allies, indeed in a way that could have wrung concessions from them. The negotiated option may now have been turned to, but the damage is done.
If Greenland (on top of already chaotic and unpredictable trade tariff attacks) represented an alarm bell for Western elites, as (belatedly at least) did the destabilization of the global economy brought about by the war on Iran, for many ordinary people across the world the slaughter in Gaza has become the red line issue of our age, albeit a slaughter backed by U.S. policy that Trump inherited rather than initiated. In 2023, the Financial Times quoted a senior G7 diplomat regarding Gaza: “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” Trump’s innovation has been to turn the criminal tragedy into a grisly real estate opportunity, with the very real prospect of billions of “reconstruction” dollars being siphoned off to he and his cronies, exemplifying again his malignant penchant for graft and self-aggrandizement.
Unhinged elites
It is quite possible that Trump’s mindset is shared by some members of the ruling class itself who can no longer think beyond violent short–term gratification: to quote Doug Henwood again, much of this class seems consumed by “wanton money lust” at the expense of strategic consideration of their longer-term interests. Salar Mohandesi suggests that in previous eras, “The fractions that made up the U.S. ruling bloc did not simply wish to enrich themselves” – that they probably, on average, thought about more than immediate gratification. Paul Heideman makes the point that the briefly cohesive U.S. ruling class of the 1970s and 1980s was willing to absorb some pain (such as higher interest rates) in order to achieve their longer-term goals of rolling back gains made by workers.
Where a longer-term perspective does now exist it is one, in some important cases, in which outright lunacy has been embraced and ignorance celebrated. Peter Thiel – Silicon Valley multi-billionaire; head of military-technology behemoth and genocide-enabler Palantir (whose software was responsible for the bombing of a school in the first day of the war on Iran, causing the death of over 175 people, most of them young girls); close friend of Jeffrey Epstein; mentor to JD Vance – raves about Armageddon and the Antichrist, whom he thinks might be Greta Thunberg. Thiel protégés are running Trump’s policy towards AI, which amounts to the abolition of regulation and ethical oversight. (Thiel himself is determined to live forever and finances research into anti-ageing medicines, including the potential of transfusing young people’s blood into his veins.)
White supremacist Elon Musk, after a stint wreaking havoc upon the U.S. public service, posits madcap plans to establish colonies on Mars and the moon. At a more mundane, but still startlingly ignorant, level Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist billionaire and Trump advisor, prattles idiotically about how introspection (seemingly invented by Freud) is the enemy of progress – Musk thinks empathy plays that role. Matt McManus asks: “How did people so deeply unethical, so opposed to basic human ideas that they view empathy as a social evil and introspection as a waste of time, come to wield power and influence over American society?”
That they wield such power is indeed alarming, but it is not necessarily in the best interests of empire – even imperialists can benefit from occasional empathy and introspection, at least in the sense of working out what others might be thinking and pausing for thought before taking action.
Trump is driving established guardians and defenders of empire (Foreign Affairs is their house journal) to the edge of reason with his rapacity, fecklessness and petulance. Robert Kagan, a neoconservative who has a long record of supporting US militarism, laments that “Washington’s conduct in the Iran war is accelerating global chaos and deepening America’s dangerous isolation”. Israel, however, is pleased that its reckless and genocidal drive for land-grabbing and regional hegemony is supported (spurred on by an influential Christian Zionist lobby, some of whose dingbats see Middle East war as a means of hastening the “end times” and the return of Christ). This is so long as Trump can share the credit for vicious stunts, however ill thought-through, like attacking Iran – a short bombing campaign in 2025 and the large-scale disaster of 2026.
There is, however, a potentially sharp tension here between Trump’s preening and pillaging proclivities: Trump wants to continue leeching money and toys for himself off the Gulf monarchies. But they are, with the exception of the seemingly more belligerent Saudi Arabia, unhappy with how his ego-slaking antics vis-à-vis Iran endangered their security and prosperity together with their images as safe sites for investment and tourism.They are also displeased with their past mediation efforts (in the case of Qatar and Oman) having been duplicitously used as cover for U.S. and Israeli war plans. They may have been accepting of attacks on Iran once the die was cast, but this war has been a catastrophe for them, with potentially serious long-term implications for their relationships not only with Trump but with the U.S. as a whole. They may not be the only countries that end up wondering whether hosting U.S. bases is, as advertised, a security guarantee or, rather, a dangerous liability.
Previous presidents have been stupid and suffused with greed, have even suffered mental instability or cognitive decline (Reagan springs to mind), but, to take the most recent example, Biden’s senility probably mattered little because his regime was staffed with long-term and loyal servants of empire drawn from what Heideman calls “the corporate foreign policy planning network”. Trump, who is himself showing signs of derangement (St. Clair diagnoses “hubristic madness” in reference to the Iran aggression), is surrounded by a plethora of grifters, lackeys, frat boys, religious wackos who wish to construct a theocratic state, delusional ethno-nationalists and obvious idiots. (Some of these chancers were reportedly keeping him ‘informed’ about the war on Iran through 2-minute daily videos of US strikes, omitting any mention of Iranian responses). Such people have always sought to influence governments but their path is significantly smoothed when the heart of the government itself is concerned only with greed and ego i.e., when there is little or no coherent project to advance the greater good of the ruling class.
The turn to China and the fate of empire
Stable partners
Confronted with Trump’s unpredictable and erratic shakedowns and smash-and-grabs, countries increasingly look more favorably on powers that are more capable of strategic thought and action, China especially, because they are seen as more stable and reliable partners. To give just one example, China appears to have played a behind-the-scenes role in negotiating the U.S.-Iran ceasefire. There is the added bonus that China is unlikely to come out with bizarre accusations of white genocide in South Africa, the description of other countries as ‘shit holes’, and the like – trivial issues in their own right but indicative of the contrast between the U.S. and China when it comes to sensible diplomacy.
China’s emerging leadership in many areas of cutting edge technology and in the shift to renewable energy enhances its attractiveness to partner countries. For example, China makes 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and its offer to Cuba provides that country a possible lifeline in the face of the U.S. energy embargo. China has also taken a decisive lead in the electric vehicle market. In a period where the dangers of fossil fuel dependency have been starkly illustrated, the advantages of this model (and of working with it) are obvious. Chinese green technology manufacturing investments now span 54 countries and are growing exponentially. (Unfortunately, a short-term consequence of the war on Iran has been a resurgence of coal usage across Asia).
A poll, carried out by Politico in February 2026 of 2000 respondents in each of France, Germany, Canada and the UK, found majorities heavily favoring cooperation with China over the U.S. Any such poll in the Global South would undoubtedly find even larger majorities leaning towards China. An article in Foreign Affairs, written in a tone of now-typical melancholy for this pro-imperialist journal, is headlined “America Has Lost the Arab World: Wars in Gaza, Iran, and Elsewhere Have Sunk Washington’s Reputation – Maybe for Good”.
The claim by Ross Babbage that Trump is “displaying a surprisingly deep strategic logic… [by] working to isolate Beijing and Moscow from their international partners” is risible. John Feffer is much closer to the truth when he laments that “If the Chinese had managed to install a real Manchurian Candidate [a brainwashed stooge secretly serving Chinese interests] in the White House, it couldn’t have done a better job than Donald Trump”. (supporters of Ukraine commonly prefer to depict Trump as a stooge of Russia). A disconsolate (is there any other sort now?) A CFR researcher writes that “Chinese President Xi Jinping is getting the United States he always wanted”.
The truth is that Trump seeks to serve no interests but his own, closely following Tony Soprano’s dictum on the endless hustle, though with even less of a long-term vision than a typical mafia boss. But it is also true that he is less consistently bellicose towards China than many U.S. anti-China elements would like, not least the notoriously hawkish Heritage Foundation, which illustrates the limits of that body’s over-hyped influence when it comes to foreign policy. Trump’s massively increased U.S. military budget does not address the structural weaknesses of that bloated military (a military that started running out of missiles after a few days bombing Iran).
The U.S. military’s reliance on Chinese rare earth minerals is strategically crucial. Building an F35 fighter jet demands some 400 kilograms of rare earths, a nuclear submarine 4,200 kilograms; rare earths are vital also for the manufacture of Tomahawk missiles (of the sort deployed against Iranian schoolgirls) and various other military assets. China accounts for an estimated 60 percent of all the world’s rare earth deposits and for 90 percent of the separation and refining capacity necessary to transform them into usable product. Western companies lag far behind in this regard. While there is a concerted U.S. drive to secure access to non-Chinese rare earths and other critical raw materials—an unusually long-term project inherited and sustained by the Trump administration—the challenge of closing the gap is substantial.
Imperial rivalry?
The latest U.S. National Security Strategy (correctly described by Juan Cole as exhibiting “crackpot logic” on issues like the claimed “civilizational erasure” of Europe) does not depict China as a military rival at all, and the same is true for Russia, which welcomed the new U.S. strategy. Russia also welcomed the potential diversion of U.S. military resources from Ukraine to Iran as well as the extra $10 billion per month it (Russia) earned courtesy of oil prices jacked up by the Iran war as the U.S. lifted its sanctions on those Russian exports. The war also saw the U.S. drawing some military resources away from eastern Asia, thereby weakening the U.S.military’s stance towards China at the same time as China’s own military power is growing apace.
China is certainly seen as a rival in many respects, as the feverish chase for critical minerals and other resources demonstrates. However, even on the economic front, Trump has typically backed down on tariffs and other issues, such as allowing the sale of advanced AI components to China, in response to Chinese pushback, including China’s blocking the supply of those rare earths. China, in short, does not lend itself to the bullying, blackmail and photo-op aggression Trump has sought to wield against other countries, and a cautiously cooperative modus vivendi may now be emerging.
History cannot be reduced to the strengths and weaknesses of individual leaders, but conjunctural factors (such as the state of a country’s ruling class, and the nature of its leadership) matter within the context of underlying, structural forces and trends. That the U.S. has a fractured and partially unhinged ruling class matters. Trump also matters: that is bad news for people living in the U.S. and those at the receiving end of bombs and missiles in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere, as well as for the 45 million extra people around the world that the World Food Programme estimated were being driven into acute hunger as a result of rising energy and fertilizer costs caused by the war on Iran (and subsequent blockades).
But it is not as if Trump has taken over and transformed a hitherto peaceful and benign U.S. state apparatus, and it is likely that an alternative U.S. government (had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election, for example) would be pursuing a more consistently hostile and confrontational approach towards Russia and China. What Cooley and Nixon fear most is that the best interests of the U.S. empire are not being well served by the current kleptocracy, indeed that they are being actively undermined, not least by that relative lack of belligerence towards what they see as the main enemies based in Moscow and Beijing. That the U.S. empire is being weakened by a profoundly corrupt and narcissistic regime, and that the world is (for now at least) being spared a concerted U.S. drive to war with Russia and/or China, are sources of consolation in otherwise bleak times. The chaos, crudity and violence of the empire under Trump 2.0 has significantly contributed to the erosion of U.S. hegemony in the world and it will be difficult for subsequent administrations to reverse that.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Trump White House; modified by Tempest.