Image by Jr Korpa.

In 1948, George Kennan, then State Department Director of Policy Planning and one of the most influential men in the United States government, wrote in an internal memo:

“[The U.S. has] about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population… Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.”

This is the naked logic of empire-building, and the true violence of its enactment both before and after Kennan’s memo would surprise many U.S. citizens, but few people elsewhere.

From the genocidal seizure of Native American lands and the transatlantic slave trade to the systematic violence underlying free trade deals that dispossessed millions of subsistence and small-scale farmers in Mexico and facilitated the forced proletarianization of formerly land-based communities in Southeast Asia, the projection of U.S. dominance across the world has always relied on the bullet or the velvet-covered fist.

Over the intervening three-quarters of a century, the U.S. government has facilitated coups, established military bases around the world, cowed nations into economic submission, and wielded both bombs and aid as cudgels to subdue and control the rest of the planet. A financial and military barricade has been erected to protect U.S. citizens — especially elites and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the middle class.

This is the context in which, in April of 2025, the Trump administration first announced, then scaled back, sweeping tariffs on products imported into the United States. The results, in the short term, were economically unprecedented. Markets went into freefall, crashing further than ever before in one day as Trump’s policies challenged the prevailing economic orthodoxy on which most U.S. business is built: ideas, intellectual property, capital, and financial products come from within the core of empire, while the dirty and hard industrial labor of actually producing physical products is done elsewhere.

Many seem to assume that Trump’s tariff policy is unintelligible, that it represents stupidity, nothing more than a strongman’s attempt to assert his authority. And in the end, that may be true. The market collapse and political backlash to Trump’s tariffs, which led to the administration walking most of the policies back within several days, may ultimately reflect an economic logic that is too deeply entrenched to be changed.

While I don’t believe in the moral righteousness of Trump’s economic policies — or in the underlying logic of U.S. dominance or industrial capitalism itself — most of the criticisms I have seen of the tariff policies are simplistic.

I am not an economist. But I am a scholar and opponent of empire, and I recognize a self-conscious attempt to reassert the economic, political, and (by extension) military dominance of the United States as a world superpower when I see one.

Trump is no fool, unfortunately. He sees rising competition, especially from China. He is concerned with maintaining hegemony against the rise of BRICS. And he believes, as articulated in this brilliant piece by Vincent Kelley in reversing the process of globalization and “re-shoring” industry.

Trump and his advisors have a long-term strategy, and in their view, rebuilding U.S. dominance may involve crushing both internal and global economic stability in the meantime. Just like Reagan’s offshoring policies in the 80s devastated the manufacturing heartland of the United States while buttressing the fortunes of the hyper-wealthy, Trump ultimately has no interest in the........

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