American imperialism: the final stage of neoliberalism
Lenin’s 1917 tract Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism is the best known of the early twentieth century analyses of imperialism. The future Soviet dictator denounced “the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries”. It describes how “this ‘booty’ is shared between two or three powerful world marauders armed to the teeth…who involve the whole world in their war over the sharing of their booty.” Of course Lenin, Stalin and their heirs were at least as rapacious in their imperial ambitions as the capitalists they denounced.
In moderate papal language, Catholic social teaching, and particularly Pope Paul VI’s remarkable Populorum Progressio published in 1967, expressed somewhat similar concerns. Though the encyclical can also be understood as the Church’s response to the threat of Communism amongst emerging developing countries.
“American imperialism” is an emotive phrase, but President Trump has given it a new lease of life. His attack on Venezuela and seizing of Maduro and his wife, the killing of their guards, were a deliberate and graphic illustration of how the President and his followers see the US role in a world now dividing into imperial domains. So far, Maduro’s toppling has had some positive results for the Venezuelan people, including the freeing of some political prisoners.
In a speech on 3 January, just after the attacks, Trump set out the core thinking behind American intervention: “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” was the message. “We are reasserting American power, in a very powerful way, in our home region”, he said, reading from a prepared speech expressing intentions which had already been set out in the November 2025 US National Security Document.
The business coterie around Trump are in competition with China and Russia for Latin America’s rare earths, minerals and, in the longer term, massive heavy crude oil reserves found on that continent. An important target audience was the sovereign states of Latin America, some of whom — such as Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay and Brazil — are increasingly collaborating to challenge unacceptable US demands.
Trump is following in the footsteps of his incomparably more talented predecessor, James Monroe, the fifth and last Founding Father to become President, whose Monroe Doctrine in the 1820s sought to remove and exclude European colonial powers from the Americas. Monroe bought Louisiana from the French for $15 million. Fast forward two centuries and Trump plans to buy Greenland and to regain control of Latin America, implementing what has been dubbed his “Donroe doctrine”.
Whatever its local impact, US promotion of back to the future scenarios hastens the collapse of the post-Second World War international order based on international law. This commitment was rooted in respect for national sovereignty, enshrined in the UN Charter, requiring strict limitations on cross-border wars, but compatible with the later idea of the “global common good”. Pope Leo XIV described it in a speech to diplomats this month as now being “completely undermined”. In a recent New York Times interview, Trump claimed his power was constrained only by “my own morality…I don’t need international law”.
Matching action to thought, Trump has just withdrawn from 66 international bodies, almost half of them UN-linked. Aware of the might of US military and their own comparative weakness, most Western leaders have hesitated to speak out. The papacy has openly called for a world order based on justice and peace and effective international organisations. This has been the consistent position of the Church from John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris 1963, Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate, 2009 to Francis’ recent Fratelli Tutti, 2020.
Pope Leo emphasized in his traditional Sunday blessing that the “well-being of the beloved Venezuelan people must prevail over all other considerations and lead to overcoming violence and pursuing paths of justice and peace, safeguarding the country’s sovereignty”. The Latin American bishops prayed for peace, unity and reconciliation for the Venezuelan people.
Today’s imperialism might best be described as “The Final Stage of Neo-liberalism”. As John Maynard Keynes’ impact on economic policy waned, neoliberalism began to take its place. Its proclaimed ideas, free market competition and deregulation as the essential dynamo of human development, choice — of material goods — and individualism, entering the West’s political bloodstream. Reagan and Thatcher, its champions, achieved three major feats. An ideology finessed as common sense. Politics, the handmaid of economics, emptied of social moral vision and purpose. Words and slogans cleverly used to misinform the public about where their true interests lay.
George Monbiot’s and Peter Hutchison’s powerful bestseller The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (Penguin, 2024) emphasises: “Its [neoliberalism’s] anonymity is both a symptom and a cause of its power”. Its main themes declare that an intrusive state with its stultifying bureaucracy is squandering taxpayers’ money. And the market unimpeded by the state should determine that the “talented and hard-working will prevail, whereas the feckless, weak and incompetent will fail.” Trump calls the latter “losers”. Redistribution and programmes rewarding these people only create dependency. “The wealth the winners generate will trickle down to enrich the rest.”
One feature of neoliberalism Monbiot and Hutchison describe in detail, shared by other ideologies, is that it doesn’t deliver what it says on the tin. There are a variety of ways to deal with the anger of its losers — who had hoped to join the winners. Aside from repression of mass protest, there is diversion, what Monbiot and Hutchison call “transfer of blame”, focusing resentment, for example, on the intrusive state, migrants, Muslims and “woke” academics. In its attack on them, neoliberalism deploys evocative words and ideas: freedom from control by elites who hold ordinary people in contempt, individual choice and responsibility. Influencers, think-tanks, newspapers and a whole TV channel, GB News, promote these ideas. To achieve neoliberalism’s economic goals “strong leaders”, even authoritarians, may be seen as desirable. A worrying number of British youth hold this view.
Every day across the world 25,000 people die of hunger and illnesses caused by malnutrition. Indebted governments have drastically cut aid budgets. We do not often hear of freedom as freedom from homelessness, hunger and insecurity, not just abroad but at home too. Taxing the elite of transnational oligarchies with their wealth laundered in London, or stashed away in off-shore havens when it takes place in British dependencies, appears to be beyond the capability of our Government. There are only a handful of — urban — examples around the world of control by genuine participatory democracy controlling the politics and economics that affect daily lives. Recapturing key words and slogans for a transformative vision of politics is long overdue.
We may actually have arrived at the final stage of imperialism and neoliberalism. The last three years have shown that the climate change crisis is already upon us. Yet in 2022, the West’s five largest oil and gas companies recorded $134 billion in “excess profits” ($134 billion more than a “normal” rate of return on capital investment). And some of the lords of Silicon Valley are worth more. These are the main beneficiaries of Trump’s policies.
Such are today’s power elites, whether in Riyadh, Moscow, Beijing or Washington. According to Oxfam, the world’s richest 1% cause a massively disproportionate share of carbon emissions. The lives and livelihoods of people around the world, including our own children and grandchildren, will be destroyed unless we, the voters in surviving democracies, have the courage to take back control.
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