““We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller told CNN host Jake Tapper, on January 5, 2026, spelling out the fascist program as he justified seizing Greenland by force. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.””
“In seeking to carry out resource extraction by brute force without the slightest pretense of any other agenda, Trump joins Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu in inaugurating an era of naked rapacity for its own sake”
“When Putin became prime minister in August 1999, his approval ratings were even lower than Trump’s are now. He solved that problem by means of the second Chechen war, which turned the polls around dramatically in his favor. Afterwards, every time his support slumped, he repeated this trick—invading Georgia in 2008, Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and Ukraine in 2022—slowly consolidating control of Russian society until he could afford to feed Russians into the meatgrinder of war a hundred thousand at a time”
“Shoveling young men from poor families in the hinterlands into the maw of war enables Putin to keep them busy; if a couple hundred thousand of them never return home, all the better—they will not show up in unemployment statistics and the police will not have to suppress their protests. Likewise, conscription has driven those who would likely lead a revolution to flee the country by the thousands”
“Capitalism began in the midst of colonial plunder, and as profit margins decline throughout the global economy, governments are returning to this old-fashioned strategy of accumulation”
“While Trump represents the turn towards autocracy, the geopolitical and economic rationale was already in place”
“Trump’s heavy-handed brutality offers the ruling class a solution to a problem that capitalists of all stripes are confronting—the problem of evaporating opportunities”
“this is not just about oil; it is a means of shoring up the conditions for capitalist profiteering in general, and a glimpse of larger-scale violence to come. We are entering a phase of relations based in pure force, not “rule of law” or diplomacy, and this attack—like Trump’s presidency itself—is a symptom, not a cause”
“In The Long Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi argues that the past 700 years have witnessed a predictable pendulum swing between relatively “peaceful” and stable periods of trade expansion, during which growing markets enable capitalists and states to profit without significant competition, and investments in production or trade generate reliable profits, and increasingly chaotic periods of financial expansion, during which inter-capitalist competition drives down profits and investment capital seeks profit primarily through financial speculation. As the global economy stops growing, capitalists and national elites increasingly turn towards force and plunder to sustain profits, culminating in periods of “systemic chaos.” These periods are remarkably violent, characterized by military expenditures and plunder; historically, they only end when a new hegemonic force imposes a new global order and restores the conditions for capitalist accumulation. 20th-century American hegemony and the international system introduced by the United Nations played that role after the Second World War, but both have been in decline since the shift towards financialization and the rise of “neoliberalism” in the 1970s, and are now displaying their irrelevance as more and more forces attempt to seize profits by pure force instead of capitalist investment. Pundits bemoaning the end of the international rules-based order and expressing nostalgia for the United Nations are missing the forest of economic stagnation for the trees of individual bad actors like Trump and Putin. Any real resolution to the period of barbarism that we are entering will have to be grander in scope and more ambitious than the “Age of Revolution” of 1789-1848”