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The Empire Rebrands: Foreign Policy Under Trump 2.0

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As we watch the Trump administration’s foreign policy take shape, I am reminded of former President Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech. That was the one where he promised that the US was seeking “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.” It was only six months into his presidency when we could still lie to ourselves that the Bush years were a just particularly abhorrent aberration.

There were shifts underway back in 2009 although they certainly didn’t have anything to do with mutual interest and respect. As Obama delivered his lies in Cairo, Obamaians were just gassing up the drones.

And the US shifted from invasion and occupation to more clandestine operations of destabilization, targeted killings, “leading from behind,” and humanitarian regime change operations. They helped craft the international liberal order often utilizing the human rights tools like LGTBQ+ rights, feminism and of course democracy to pursue the same goals as Bush the Younger. but in a more “woke” manner.

Yet this mode of empire had outlived its usefulness. A growing number of states are following Russia’s lead and cracking down on foreign funding of NGOs. There is the inability to bludgeon European voters upset over deteriorating living standards into submission using moralistic certitude. And the dam broke in the US where Trump — with the backing of the majority of plutocrats — is now dismantling this machinery. What will take its place?

Now there are actual shifts taking place under Trump (attempting to get out of Ukraine and dump it on the hapless Europeans, actualizing the long-planned pivot to Asia, a renewed emphasis on shipping lanes, cracking down on DEI and elements of the Blob that hounded him during first term and beyond), but all signs are that the underlying goals of empire remain: that US capital controls the world and can extract rent from every corner of the globe. This isn’t changing based on an election despite Obama’s repeated assurances that “the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.”

A week ago I wrote about the repackaging of the empire sales pitch to the American working class. Here I’d like to focus on how the Trump rebrand is playing out across the world.

***

So what of the Trump rebrand? So much of the focus has recently been on Ukraine and Russia — not  unjustifiably so considering the stakes — but regardless of whether Washington and Moscow can find a way to overcome the US long history of non-agreement capability, American efforts at global hegemony aren’t going to die quietly.

For one, there is evidence that one of the drivers behind seeking rapprochement with Russia is to make Washington’s task of taking on China slightly more feasible. There’s also the simple fact that the US has little other choice. They’ve lost Project Ukraine.

Any change in marketing is more likely an indication that the plutocrats and their think tanks believe the “woke” empire reached its sell-by-date, and it’s time to rebrand. More than an acceptance of multipolarity, this is probably more a reflection of disappointment with some of the returns from the Biden administration — especially on the Russia collapse bet. So while the plutocrats might be forced to accept that running an unwinnable proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is stupid strategy, which it is (as well as a human tragedy), and Trump is tasked with getting out of the mess, that doesn’t herald a seachange in how US plutocrats view the world.

Here are some other observations demonstrating that talk of managed imperial decline and acceptance of multipolarity are nothing more than rebranding of empire.

American Ideas of Multipolarity

Much was made about Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Jan. 30 interview with Megyn Kelly in which he discussed multipolarity. But let’s look more closely at what he really said:

And I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem.  And there are terrible things happening in the world.  There are.  And then there are things that are terrible that impact our national interest directly, and we need to prioritize those again.  So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power.  That was not – that was an anomaly.  It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.  We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.

This is not the same multipolarity as envisioned by China, Russia, and others, which is largely based on win-win deals. As many have pointed out, the US seeks win-lose transactions, and this is nothing new under Trump. As Glenn Diesen states:

In a multipolar world, security is enhanced by reducing the security competition between the great powers, while a mutually beneficial peace can exist under a balance of power and acceptance of the status quo. Even small- and medium-sized states can obtain more political autonomy from the great powers by cooperating with all great powers to diversify their economic connectivity. However, the US appears to be attempting to defeat China as its main rival, and coerce small and medium states into spheres of influence to ensure political and economic obedience.

Back to Rubio. He’s long been a warmongering neocon, and if we look at a wider sample size than just the widely circulated quote from the Kelly interview, it’s clear that’s still what the administration is selling.

As Un-Diplomatic points out this idea that Rubio is representative of a wider acceptance of multipolarity in the Trump administration comes despite the fact that his confirmation testimony before the Senate:

Using his prepared statement to call pro-Palestinian peace protestors Jihadist terrorists;

Hijacking leftist critiques of capitalism to make an argument for why we ought to thrust toward World War III;

Hanging his entire ideology on “national sovereignty” that he does not extend to other nations;

Explicitly declaring “global order” not only “obsolete” but also a weapon being used against America.

And if we look at what he said just a few minutes later in the very same Megyn Kelly interview, it sounds a lot more like business as usual:

If you look around the world, I would say that in many cases our adversaries are stronger than they’ve ever been and became stronger over the last four years…

I think if you look at the Middle East, we had the outbreak of a war that can – that’s been incredibly costly and divisive.  It started on October 7th when these savages came across and committed these atrocities.

We have a war in Europe as well in Ukraine, as I mentioned a moment ago.  So we had to – and I think really one of the linchpins that sort of triggered all of that was that chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.  I think that sent a very clear signal to someone like Vladimir Putin that America was actually in decline or distracted – we can move – and he did.

I think you see it in the Indo-Pacific where every day – it’s not just Taiwan; it’s the Philippines – are being aggressively challenged by the Chinese militarily, or coercion is spreading throughout the world, the Chinese are using coercive tactics, not just in their – near abroad, but in other parts of the world as well.

And the following is key:

I think we have a lot of work to do.  And I’m going to tell you – and this is something that’s not often appreciated enough – countries will openly complain about the U.S. being very firm and being engaged in these things in a very firm way; but privately, in many cases, they welcome it.  They welcome U.S. engagement.  They want to know – they want clarity in our foreign policy, and then they want us to take action to be reliable.

Rubio, as the foreign representative of the United Plutocrats, is signalling with his fabricated history and announcement of intentions that they’re still living in a fantasy land and are not going to go peacefully into reality. What he’s talking about is American hegemony — just with different strategies on how to get there.

So what are those strategies?

Let’s Have Ourselves an AI Cold War 

Before Vice President JD Vance’s dress down of the European political elite over certain speech restrictions at the Munich Security Conference, he was in Paris for the international AI summit. It received far less attention, but there he delivered menacing remarks on the US dominating the future of AI. Here are a few highlights:

The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. It will be won by building — from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.

…And yesterday, as I was touring Les Invalides with General Gravett with my three kids, he was kind enough to show me the sword that belonged to America’s dearest international friend from our own revolution — of course, the Marquis de Lafayette.

He let me hold the sword, but, of course, he made me put on the white gloves beforehand, and it got me thinking of this country, France, and of course of my own country and of the beautiful civilization that we have built together with weapons like that saber — weapons that are dangerous in the wrong hands but are incredible tools for liberty and prosperity in the right hands.

I couldn’t help but think of the conference today. If we choose the wrong approach on other things that could be conceived of as dangerous — things like AI — and choose to hold ourselves back, it will alter not only our GO- — GDP or the stock market but the very future of the project that Lafayette and the American founders set off to create.

The US and the UK of course refused to sign a weak, non-binding declaration pledging to develop AI responsibly. Vance instead called for a civilizational AI struggle against China — and anyone that would use Chinese technology.

The Trump administration is continuing Biden’s Cold War anti-China policy and, also like Biden, is demanding more and more tribute payments from its “allies.”

The US continues to cannibalize the EU, and the case of Taiwan is illustrative. Biden started the pressure on Taiwanese chip making giant TSMC to move some chip production out of Taiwan (just in case!). Team Trump just strong-armed the company into  expanding the company’s investments in the U.S., with an additional $100 billion planned on top of the previously announced $65 billion.

That might have been the “least bad” outcome for TSMC, which was facing calls to take a stake in floundering Intel.

Still, by forcing TSMC to invest stateside, the US might also be destroying the company which will harm its customers and suppliers, most of which are US firms. The US simply isn’t a financially feasible manufacturing location. There’s a lack of workforce, but the biggest problem remains its hyper neoliberalism. As Micahel Hudson writes:

[The US] has built too high a rentier overhead into its economy for its labor to be able to compete internationally, given the U.S. wage-earner’s budgetary demands to pay high and rising housing and education costs, debt service and health insurance, and for privatized infrastructure services.

Yet Vance was in Paris demanding countries fall in line behind the US AI empire or risk becoming adversaries.What does all this mean on the home front? AI advancement is now priority one and the American plutocrats are tying most of their hopes for US supremacy to it.

While Vance spoke in Paris about AI “empowering” workers and both Biden and now Trump champion the jobs TSMC investment in the US will create, make no mistake about it: jobs and the well being of American proles are not the aim here. It is empire and maintaining obscene amounts of wealth for American plutocrats, which dream of AI rendering human labor obsolete. Vance’s remarks in Paris are tied directly back to Musk and the DOGE boys taking a wrecking ball to the federal government to aid its looting and create a giant AI dystopia:

It’s as if Vance and the administration are taking policy directly from the recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, the CEO and general counsel of Palantir. That wouldn’t be surprising since Vance is largely a project of Palantir founder, Paypal mafia billionaire, and young blood connoisseur Peter Thiel. Here’s Unpopular Front on The Technological Republic: 

The book is extremely creepy: It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public “oversight for me, surveillance for thee.”

…To recap, Karp wrote his dissertation on a form of rhetoric that employs aggression to bind a community together and then he goes and writes a terrible, jargon-filled, cliché-riddled book about how the United States needs to rearm with the help of Silicon Valley. The shittiness, one might say, is the point: is Karp intentionally using jargon in this technical sense to create his own vision of Volksgemeinschaft? Maybe, but the rhetoric is not stirring! As for “aggression in the life-world,” Karp is saying “Yes, please!” In the book, Karp explicitly says how he wants to cultivate a more martial society to defend “the West.”

Shift from Woke Empire to a More Traditional Form of Empire Building

One of the key “stakeholders” in the Trump-DOGE movement are the Conservative think tankers and Christian right, represented by Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The founder of a right-wing Christian think tank, he wrote the chapter on executive power for Project 2025.

This strain of Christian conservatism has for decades viewed the government as dominated by Marxists. While that’s not true, one can understand the complaints about liberal grifting: “The state is crawling with nonproductive special interests: liberal elites, minority rights advocates, undocumented immigrants and their allies, all animated by the desire to sustain themselves without effort of their own.”

We see Musk making similar comments about USAID.

And Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, for example, likes to do the same. Here he is speaking at last year’s National Conservatism Conference (a Thiel-funded project):

The new left we now face is not simply nationalistic in character. It is totalitarian in its mission. It is expansionist, imperialistic, and practically jihadist in its theocratic stance. Given its international scope, limitless financial resources, and unprecedented technological sophistication, the global uber-nation the left is now building already threatens Americans more comprehensively and intimately than the USSR [ever did]…

While the US has for decades, under GOP or Democrat rule [1], been transferring wealth upwards, the claim that liberals are Marxists refuses to die.

One explanation between the ongoing confusion is that there other benefits to equating the two, such as enlisting the Christian right as foot soldiers for the ambitions of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. That’s because the answer for Vought, Roberts, and others who adhere to this line of thinking is to demolish the government. It is the enemy. While one can understand the sentiment among a beaten down working class that rarely ever sees government work for them, supporting its demolishment pays no mind to who will pick up the pieces, namely Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires who, like the liberal grifters, also desire to sustain themselves without effort of their own.

This fusing of liberal identity grift with the economic left is also being used as bludgeon against the latter:

And in the case of the American empire, the door has been slammed shut on the Woke Imperium. Lest we forget that brief period of imperial American branding:

Such selective use of ‘woke’ causes allows for an open-ended potential for intervention in a long list of trouble spots in the Global South while also shoring up a domestic narrative that intervention would be beneficial—and outright righteous— given the purity of the Blob’s convictions.

We used to get stuff like this to sell US proxies:

Now there’s this:

More widely, the Trump administration and its backers like Thiel are keen to use Christian nationalism in the same way wokeness was used: to amass power and wealth. Among all the tech goons crawling around Washington these days, Thiel is one of the spookiest and most geo-politically strategic. One could argue he is now the leader of the tech-based section of the military-industrial complex, and he has for years tutored Vance. Does the latter share Thiel’s vision for “post-democratic” rule?  As Thiel has said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Silicon Valley tech billionaires instead must guide American society — whether it’s willing to follow or not. And as Thiel’s business partner, Karp, wrote in Technological Republic, they must  cultivate a more martial society to defend “the West.”

That of course includes more power and money to Silicon Valley so it can maybe produce weapons to defeat enemies like China and definitely get rich doing trying.

It also means fostering Christian Zionism and support for“post-democracy,” which are are rampant in the Trump administration.

It’s even visible in the Secretary of Defense’s ink:

Sure enough, Hegseth is making it easier to commit war crimes, as if the US needed any more encouragement on that front. From Daniel Larison:

Hegseth has derided international law and the domestic laws governing war for many years, and he has been a vocal cheerleader for accused and convicted war criminals. His advocacy for war criminals was one of the main reasons why he was unfit to be Secretary of Defense, and he is already proving his critics right. It is unsurprising but still alarming that he would remove officers that might get in the way of future lawbreaking. Presumably he will now fill these roles with replacements that share his ideological hostility to the rule of law.

The Secretary of Defense admitted that the reason for removing the JAGs was so that they wouldn’t be “roadblocks to anything that happens.”

Roadblocks that attempted to prevent American corporations from essentially buying off foreign governments are also being removed . While there was a lot of celebration about the blows dealt to USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy by the Trump Administration, it should be clear by now that’s not exactly what happened. The corruption is just becoming more efficient. [2]

Trump also recently rolled back the minor constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and special operation raids outside conventional battlefields, which basically means the US can label anyone anywhere a “terrorist” and target them for death.

Hegseth reportedly wants a larger, more aggressive force less hindered by the laws of armed conflict.

One obvious benefit of a marketing rethink from Davos liberalism to an AI plutocracy dressed up as Christian nationalism is that it’s challenging to sell and inspire many people to fight for the former. In the US, the bourgeoisie might fly a Ukrainian flag above their “in this house we believe” yard signs, but they’re not prepared to fight. Nationalism, religion, and defense of a common heritage are more useful tools in what’s being pitched as a civilizational battle. Nazi salutes by prominent Trump backers like Musk and Steve Bannon surely appeal to some as well.

It’s worth noting that US military recruitment is on the rise.

There is evidence, however, that the uptick began last year as the Army overhauled much of its nearly $2 billion recruiting enterprise, but they climbed higher in December and January.

Maybe the Nazi salutes by prominent Trump backers like Musk and Steve Bannon will help appeal to some as well.

It’s not just in Ukraine that Western elite have been cultivating Nazis for a long time but also across all the former USSR states as well as the West itself. What’s the point unless you’re going to cash those chips in at some point?

Despite Vance’s calling out of DEI-”woke”-green Europe and the bloc’s anti-democratic thuggery towards voters supporting insurgent parties in Germany and Romania, let’s not forget what Vance didn’t mention:

He did not include any references to draconian crackdowns on opposition to genocide in Palestine, nor did he complain about the tours of Europe by neo-Nazi Ukrainian groups. Indeed, as he lectures the EU on speech, the US continues to tighten the muzzle on any opposition to US-backed Zionist war crimes. It’s much more likely that Vance and the new brand of American empire simply want the EU to move along with its own shift to civilizational struggle. It might not be far off what with drastic increases in military expenditures on the way, causing more widespread economic pain and social discontent leading to further gains for the “far right.”  And a neo-Nazi regime fighting a war against Russia on the bloc’s Eastern border. What could go wrong?

It might be a stretch to assume that all the bickering between the US and EU nations over Ukraine is kayfabe, but it should be pointed out that this was the plan all along. Go back and read through any number of think tank pieces over the past five years. This was it. Let the Europeans shoulder more of the burden against Russia while the US focuses on China. Is it doomed to fail? Almost certainly — on both fronts.

The US now might be trying to win Russia over to its side and create some divisions between Russia and China — yet another sign of pervasive thinking in DC that underestimates others and overestimates their own cleverness. Meanwhile, is there any sign that Trump and Rubio’s handlers aren’t going to accept sharing the pie with others until maybe after many more years of repeated humiliations? In other words, more Ukraines.

If you step back, that’s what the rest of Europe is starting to resemble: Project Ukraine in its early years. Is the EU finally going to move forward with plans to remilitarize? It’s hardly even possible, but a destabilized mess of fascist anti-Russian fanatics? Well, that’ll suit the new American Imperium just fine.

Notes

[1] Trump is not a unique threat but rather a logical continuation of imperial capitalism in which the empire is running up against resistance. Democrats largely pursue the same if arriving there by a different, slower route, and they are already planning to follow the lead and tack further to the right, ensuring there will be little rollback of Trump_DOGE policies regardless of who wins in 2028. They and Trump compliment one another well with the latter acting as an accelerant.

[2] While USAID, often used as cover to meddle in other countries, is folded into the State Department and downsized, Fiorella Isabel describes how the vacuum left by USAID is merely being absorbed and transformed to fit the empire’s rebrand. For instance:

Another issue is that while the anti-deep state mob that supports Trump thinks he’s clearing out a huge mess, the truth is he’s replacing the governments structures with technocrats who won’t give transparency on any money spent.

Statements by Trump and Rubio clearly show that the rethink of USAID is part of the US rebrand.Here’s Trump:

“We just want to do the right thing. It’s something that should have been done a long time ago. Went crazy during the Biden administration. They went totally crazy what they were doing and the money they were giving to people that shouldn’t be getting,” Trump said in the Oval Office.

…Pressed about his support for USAID during his first term in office, Trump said he loved the “concept” but not the execution of the agency’s mission.

“They turn out to be radical left lunatics. And the concept of it is good, but it’s all about the people,” he said.

And Rubio:

Speaking to the press in El Salvador, Rubio said the “functions of USAID” must align with US foreign policy and that it is “a completely unresponsive agency.”

When asked about the arguments that USAID’s work is vital to national security and promoting US interests, Rubio said, “There are things that USAID, that we do through USAID, that we should continue to do, and we will continue to do.”

“This is not about ending the programs that USAID does, per se,” he said.

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