Imperium at Dusk

The rules-based international order and its discontents.

Bretton Woods Conference, Mount Washington Hotel, New Hampshire, 1944.

The organizing principle of the world as it emerged out of the Second World War is the primacy of American hegemony. Unlike the old order dominated by European colonial powers, the perverse consummation of which was the fascist menace, the American political establishment saw the emergence of the new hegemonic era as marked by liberal internationalist values. The success of the American century lay in its ability to institutionalize imperial power through a rules-based international order. Thus, if protections against the illiberal instability of inter-imperial conflict were to inhere in the post-war global order, America’s role as its chief guarantor was the culmination of the divinely ordained purpose of the country born out of the Revolution of 1776. Faced with this unprecedented opportunity to mold the world in its interests, the United States thus retained its role as the principal axis of stability for much of the historical progression of post-war global capitalism.

The current moment presents itself as a juncture in the historical development of American hegemony and the soi-disant rules-based order that has hitherto maintained it. The dialectic of American decline and China’s rise lays bare the sharpening of the contradictions of global capitalism. The emergence of Trumpism as a symptom of this crisis demystifies the crude logic of imperialism at the base of the liberal internationalist superstructure. Rather than fostering stability, the U.S. is increasingly seen by the imperial ruling classes as a growing source of volatility within global capitalism. The ability of Uncle Sam to retain its role as the guarantor of global capitalism is precarious, as are the prospects of the reproduction of the rules-based order.

This inflection point raises immediate questions: What was the real nature of the U.S.-managed global order? What of its decline? What manner of conceptual analysis best divulges the attitudes of the junior ruling classes to the present crisis? The incipience of the present crisis limits us to a preliminary set of observations.

I

The unraveling of the old order in the inter-imperialist conflict during what Domenico Losurdo called the Second Thirty Years’ War¹ engendered two incontestable faits accomplis: the decline of Europe and the elevation of the U.S. to the most decisive geopolitical actor. The interplay between these two realities was dialectical in nature: the precondition for U.S. hegemony was its ability to actively instrumentalize the concrete elements of the implosion of Europe. The effects of the First World War on the Entente compelled it to finance its war by taking on massive debts from Washington. The latter, understanding quite well the resultant leverage it had come to possess, did not fail to cynically wield its position as world creditor along with an insistence on protectionism to expand its own manufacturing share of the global market to a tremendous degree.² The intergovernmental debt circle that thus emerged led, in part, to the Great Depression,³ a crisis that was finally resolved by the boom of the Second World War, which, being the final nail in the coffin of British power, prepared the ground for the U.S. to emerge as the unequivocal hegemon. Not least was this solidified by the implementation of the Marshall Plan, which restructured the Western European economy in fundamental ways, principally to attain full economic integration of Western Europe with the U.S., while isolating the U.S.S.R.⁴

In tandem, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) was established along analogous lines: a mechanism of Western European dependence on the U.S. for security achieved the twin objectives of ensuring American military supremacy over the continent as well as securing a reliable market for the U.S. defense industry. Central to the U.S. project of carrying out a Cold War⁵ against the Soviet Union, the primary objective of NATO was to curb communist influence, which was seen as the antithesis of the rules-based order. To that end, NATO was to security what the Marshall Plan was to the immediate post-war Western European economy.

The immediate position of the U.S. at the denouement of the Second World War belied any semblance of parity with the Allies, thus providing Washington with immense leeway in restructuring the global order in a manner that entrenched its own interests as paramount. The post-war period (1945-1971) saw the establishment of the Bretton Woods system: a conglomeration of mutually dependent economic and financial institutions (principally the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) under American hegemony. The linking of voting power in these institutions to the percentage of financial share resulted in virtual U.S. veto power.⁶ The disparity in the leveraging powers of the actors at the time of the Bretton Woods negotiations thus preserved its continuity in the form of an inescapable incommensurability in the concrete functioning of the system. Nonetheless, America’s ability to stabilize inter-imperialist contradictions by acting as “a guardian of the general interest of all capitals” was essential to the articulation of modern imperialism.⁷ Thus, America’s allies (principally Western Europe, Canada, and Japan) assumed the status of junior partners in the hierarchy of the broader imperialist bloc referred to as the Global North. Bretton Woods thus instituted stability, to some extent, as a basic characteristic of the Global North, thereby constituting the radix of what would become the rules-based order.

If the asymmetrical relation of the imperial core to the periphery was the basic characteristic of capitalist development as such, its post-war configuration expresses itself with its own specificities. The provenance of the dollar’s function as the effective international trade currency and the foreign exchange anchor lies in Bretton Woods. Capital’s “complete freedom of action”⁸ that emerged from the removal of trade barriers in the periphery allowed the Global North to facilitate capital accumulation on an unprecedented scale. Due to the law of unequal exchange, the transfer of value in this economic arrangement was hardly equitable.⁹ Furthermore, as credit conditions for developing countries, the modus operandi of institutions like the IMF and the World Bank was to mandate structural adjustment programs (economic liberalization, austerity-driven fiscal policy, and opening to foreign investment) to ensure the safe proliferation of Global North capital.¹⁰ The failure of the development of genuine economic and agricultural sovereignty at a large scale in the periphery ought not to be disentangled from the structure of post-war imperialism. The perpetuation of the Global South’s role as a dependency was, thus, by design. To qualify the nature of the Bretton Woods as a rules-based order for Global North capital appears to be a necessary intervention.

This necessitates an attentive examination of the development of European social democracy as a condition of imperialism. The welfare state model is incomprehensible without an analysis of the dominant position of Anglo-European capital toward the Global South. Super-exploitation, due to the difference in the value of variable capital in the Global South versus the Global North, is the material precondition of the Nordic model.¹¹ Furthermore, the ability to rely on the U.S. for their security also represents a particular inflection in the development of social democracy among non-U.S. NATO members. Thus, the golden age of capitalism, in essence, refers to the development of a labor aristocracy in the core that developed on the backs of a system of managed class compromise; the generation of the consequent threat to maximal profit accumulation necessitates the externalization of the contradictions inherent to the laws of capital to the Global South, which in turn radically enhances the acuteness of the contradictions of the development of an international proletarian alliance. In this manner, the primary contradiction that ought to be resolved in the present moment reveals itself to be imperialism, and any workers’ movement in the global north that fails to situate this point inevitably risks falling into social-imperialism and national chauvinism.

Any system of hegemony requires the consent of the masses to function without disruption. As mentioned, in the Global North, the process of attaining consent was social democracy. Due to the radically different role played by the U.S. hegemony in the Global South, however, the means of procuring consent required a reconfiguration. Imperialism inexorably produces resistance and thus necessitates violence. During the Cold War, the impetus to contain the U.S.S.R. manifested itself in brutal wars of aggression in Korea and Indochina, which left millions dead in attempts to violently subdue the prospects of independent socialist development.¹² The U.S. established a global apparatus of regime change coups, which ranged from Latin America to Central Asia, forming an essential pillar of America’s responsibility as global hegemon to neutralize any challenge to the free movement of capital and facilitate its accumulation in the Global North.¹³

The unipolar world that emerged after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 radically intensified American imperial ambitions. In Brezinski’s words, the goal was to ensure that “no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.”¹⁴ Emblematic displays of NATO’s status as a staple of the rules-based order, including the war on Yugoslavia and the destruction of Libya, reveal the continuity in the conduct of the organization throughout its historical development. In the Middle East, in the absence of any check on its power, the global war on terror seemed an apt opportunity to massively increase Anglo-American influence in one of the world’s most resource-rich regions. In the most representative example of the irony of the war on terror, the decade-long dirty war in Syria has crystallized in the installation of a puppet government led by a former Al-Qaeda operative, joining the Gulf autocracies in the list of U.S. satellites in the region.¹⁵ Furthermore, incontrovertible support for Israeli apartheid continues to retain its role as the lynchpin of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the culmination of which is the Gaza genocide.¹⁶ The American-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, with the support of much of the Global North, is the latest attempt in a broader endeavor, which was revitalized in the wake of October 7th, to subjugate any remnants of sovereigntist elements in the Middle East. Thus, a concrete analysis reveals a clear picture of the dialectic of the rules-based international order: peace in the Global North is necessarily predicated upon violence and volatility in the Global South.

II

China occupies a structurally distinct position in global capitalism. The Maoist era’s (1949-76) mass nationalization and central planning laid the groundwork for much of the subsequent development of the country.¹⁷ China’s response to the global neoliberal period arising out of the capitalist crises of the 1970s was to enact its own iteration of a New Economic Program (NEP), the theoretical backbone of which was recognition of the contradictions of developing a socialist society in a global environment dominated by capitalist hegemony.¹⁸ Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (SCC) thus allowed room for the existence of domestic and foreign bourgeois elements, all subsumed under the political primacy of the Communist Party of China. By the 1990s, China’s integration into global capitalism was solidified, albeit with a specificity that ought to be precisely delineated. As Samir Amin writes, “China’s integration into globalization has remained, moreover, partial and controlled (or at least controllable, if one wants to put it that way). China has remained outside of financial globalization. Its banking system is completely national and focused on the country’s internal credit market. Management of the yuan is still a matter for China’s sovereign decision-making. The yuan is not subject to the vagaries of the flexible exchanges that financial globalization imposes.”¹⁹

The achievements of SCC are clear: a degree of industrial development unprecedented in the Global South and the abolition of extreme poverty.²⁰ Two of the leading crises facing global capitalism, namely economic stagnation and ecocide, transform themselves in radically different ways when confronted by the Chinese model. The profitability crisis of the 1970s led the U.S. to abandon industrial development and rely primarily on financial imperialism to preserve its hegemony, a course of action whose contradictions proved unresolvable by 2008, as the financial crisis made clear. By contrast, the planning capacity of the Chinese state has allowed the country to become the leading global manufacturer.²¹ In terms of the ecological crisis, the ability of the CPC-led planned economy to overcome vested interests of fossil capital has resulted in incomparable investments in renewable energy,²² paired with China’s growing successes in the technological war over machine learning and artificial intelligence.²³ China’s location in global capitalism manifests as a disruption in the standard imperialist hierarchy and destabilizes the standard relationship of the core to the periphery. Rather than functioning as a dependency of the imperial core, China’s status in the Global South is profoundly anomalous. The ideological problems this creates for liberal intellectuals in the West are myriad and thus form the impetus for the near-constant anxiety around China’s emergence as a global power. This forms the justification for the near-constant brinkmanship and military encirclement, which serves as the basis of U.S. foreign policy towards China.²⁴

The Bretton Woods global architecture emerged alongside U.S. industrial supremacy as its own political-economic scaffolding. These very factors led to an affluent labor aristocracy, along with a strong workers’ movement whose central goal was to win concessions from the global surplus accumulated by the ruling classes. The culmination of increasingly uncontrollable U.S. fiscal policy, in large part due to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, led to the collapse of the gold standard in 1971.²⁵ The subsequent profitability crisis, in part due to a strong labor movement, evinced the contradiction at the heart of reformism. Neoliberalism emerged as the definite solution to this crisis: deregulation, austerity, and the movement of capital to the Global South.²⁶ In this manner, the New Deal and neoliberalism, though different reconfigurations of capital, are structurally equivalent in their function of saving the present mode of production from its own crises. Unlike the success of the reforms in the 1930s to rejuvenate American industry, the neoliberal turn achieved precisely the opposite and laid the basis for deindustrialization. Without a powerful industry, the character of U.S. hegemony would assume a form of financial imperialism and hyper-militarism.²⁷ While neoliberalism and the amplification of adventurist militarism tipped the scales further in favor of the financial ruling class, they were expressions of the fledgling fissures in U.S. imperialism.

III

The U.S. government's increasingly hostile attitude towards the core elements of the rules-based order ought to be situated within the broader framework of the crisis of hegemony. The second Trump Administration’s foreign trade policy reveals a long-awaited reckoning with the fragility of a hegemonic superstructure imposed upon a financial economy devoid of an industrial backbone, or the “real economy.” The function of Trump’s trade policy is to re-establish past industrial prowess through heavy protectionism and a global devaluation of the dollar.²⁸ This is not dissimilar to what took place, with tremendous long-term success, in the inter-war period. In sum, a major tendency of the Trump Administration’s trade policy is an effort to stabilize American hegemony in the face of increasing signs of its decline. The difference in material conditions between the present moment and the inter-war period, however, makes it entirely unclear as to the prospects of the success of such a strategy. Britain, along with much of the Entente, had its economy ravaged by the war, the effects of which were only made worse due to the massive amounts of intergovernmental debts owed to the U.S. Not only does such a situation not exist presently, but the rise of alternative powers like China, as well as trading blocs like BRICS, significantly dampens American leverage over allies, as evidenced by the latter’s growing economic integration with China.²⁹ The confluence of these factors seems to point to a rather ironic alternative possibility of further weakening U.S. hegemony.

The Trump administration’s aversion to NATO rests on a deep-seated assumption of the apparent exploitation of the U.S. by the organization. Belying the reality of NATO’s role as the principal military organ of the U.S. empire, it points to a fundamental contradiction in the Trump administration’s orientation towards the international role of the U.S. state, namely the attempt to recover American hegemony through isolationism. This tendency may be modified more precisely as isolationist regionalism, as is revealed through Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine and his recent attempts to subdue any remnants of sovereignty in Latin America and solidify the region’s dependence as an American colony. The identical contradiction runs through Trump’s critiques of the past U.S. foreign policy of forever wars in the Middle East; the failure of the U.S. to rapidly achieve regime change in Iran might result in a reproduction of the Bush-Obama-Biden era policy in West Asia.

Trumpism’s method of resolving contradictions at home references familiar fascist precedent. The crisis of the 1970s, resolved by the launch of the neoliberal era, led to a shrinking of the middle class and massive empowerment of the rule of capital over labor. A palpable reduction in the segment of the American working class able to accrue benefits from the imperial surplus has led to stagnant wages and increasing social unrest. The failure of neoliberalism to gain consent for itself is undeniable. For the Global North, Bretton Woods institutionalized a regime of stability predicated upon the idea of class compromise. Though the incoherence of such a notion was unveiled by the breakdown of the entire system, the absence of a genuine workers’ movement, paired with the psychological effects of the erosion of the notion of the Bretton Woods superstructure in the form of the American Dream, paved the way for a successful right-wing populism in the form of Trump. The reliance on hyper-nationalism and nativism as a political program thus emerges as a necessity, as evidenced by the intensification of the state-run execution regime in the form of ICE.³⁰

The distinction between continuity and change in the modus operandi of the U.S. is subtle and demands precise attention. The major difference in traditional U.S. imperial policy compared to the present is that the need to justify it in liberal terms no longer appears as a requirement; the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and colonization of Venezuela are justified by their mere performance as a signifier to American power. Similarly, as opposed to occurring out of the public eye through the prison system, as was the case under Obama,³¹ the present mass deportation regime’s function is public spectacle. While the U.S. state and intelligence apparatus exerted a considerable amount of deceptive effort in building domestic consent for Iraq, the propaganda behind the imperialist war against Iran required little more than inchoate, often contradictory signaling.³² In the final analysis, the primary novelty that characterizes the Trump era is not so much imperialism itself, but the fracture of American hegemony into a state of profound precarity, unable to secure acquiescence in the conventional manner. The intensification of this structural constraint is the objective condition of the fracturing of the rules-based order, insofar as it is synonymous with U.S. imperialism.

The increasingly trepidatious attitude of America’s junior imperialist partners finds its most representative example in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s proclamation of the end of U.S. hegemony at Davos.³³ Two mutually contradictory tendencies pervade Carney’s speech. First, the notion that the American hegemonic era was a “pleasant fiction” based on a false story. Second, a nostalgia for the genuine virtues of the rules-based order and its institutions, upon which “the middle powers have relied” as a means of “collective problem solving.” The remedy to this “rupture” in the rules-based order is twofold: “applying the same standards to allies and rivals,” as well as “building a strong domestic economy,” partly with expanding diplomatic and economic relations with non-hegemons. Regarding the former, there appears to be no significant policy development: the junior partners, including Canada, remain either silent or actively complicit in the Trumpian foreign policy of facilitating genocide in Gaza or pursuing regime change in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. And Carney’s method of domestic economic development consists of further entrenching neoliberalism while intensifying anthropogenic ecocide.³⁴

In this manner, the interests of the junior ruling classes in the Global North function as an international analogue to the classic petit-bourgeois class position, characterized by an aspiration to benefit from the rule of the hegemon, along with a perennial state of anxiousness of being reduced to the rank of the colonized. Far from being a mere error in logic, the incongruity in Carney’s attitude is a structural necessity, generated by the contradiction inherent in the hierarchical position of the junior imperialist. Furthermore, the response to system-level crises plays a fundamentally reactionary role by insisting on a reversion to strengthen the intermediary imperialist powers by finding avenues of maximizing capital accumulation outside of the hegemonic bloc. This is partly a failure of analysis, explained by the incoherence of bourgeois consciousness as mandated by its own class position. As György Lukács states:

“For the bourgeoisie was quite unable to perfect its fundamental science, its own science of classes: the reef on which it foundered was its failure to discover even a theoretical solution to the problem of crises. The fact that a scientifically acceptable solution does exist is of no avail. For to accept that solution, even in theory, would be tantamount to observing society from a class standpoint other than that of the bourgeoisie. And no class can do that – unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely. Thus the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself. It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and is neither arbitrary, subjective nor psychological.”³⁵

The present crisis, resulting from contradictions within global capitalism, is unresolvable by means of reaction. In Antonio Gramsci’s words, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”³⁶ Anything short of a concrete analysis of the inherent instability of the capitalist relation of production, and therefore its succession, only sharpens the risks of the looming environmental and military catastrophe.

1. Losurdo, Domenico. Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn (New York: Monthly Review, 2024).

2. Hudson, Michael. Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire. Dresden: Islet-Verlag, 2021.

3. Hudson, Super Imperialism.

4. Pauwels, Jacques R. “Americanizing France: The Marshall Plan, Reconsidered.” CounterPunch, March 4, 2024. https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/04/americanizing-france-the-marshall-plan-reconsidered/.

5. Stephanson, Anders. American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters. (London: Verso, 2025). Stephanson problematizes the notion of the Cold War as a state of affairs characterized by an inevitable confrontation between two competing, equally adversarial entities. He argues, rather, that the Cold War was wholly an American project. Not least is this evidenced by Stalin’s repeated overtures to the U.S. for reconciliation and integration in the immediate post-war period.

6. Prashad, Vijay. “The Global North Has Nine Times More Voting Power at the IMF Than the Global South: The Tenth Newsletter (2025).” Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, March 6, 2025. https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/global-north-imf-inequality/.

7. Anderson, Perry. The American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers (London: Verso, 2015). Anderson offers one of the most systematic Marxist analyses of the workings of the structure of U.S. imperialism.

8. Marx, Karl. “On the Question of Free Trade.” Speech to the Democratic Association of Brussels, January 9, 1848. Marxists Internet Archive. Translated by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Accessed March 8, 2026. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/01/09ft.htm.

9. Emmanuel, Arghiri. Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. Translated by Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Though it finds its roots in the work of Marx & Engels, Emmanuel offers the most representative treatment of the theory of Unequal Exchange. The radical disparity between wages in the core and the periphery forms the basis of systematic value transfer.

10. Sullivan, Dylan, and Jason Hickel. “Plundering Africa: Income Deflation and Unequal Ecological Exchange under Structural Adjustment Programmes.” Review of African Political Economy, February 28, 2025. https://roape.net/2025/02/28/plundering-africa-income-deflation-and-unequal-ecological-exchange-under-structural-adjustment-programmes/.

11. Lauesen, Torkil. Riding the Wave: Sweden’s Integration into the Imperialist World System. Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2021.

12. Robinson, Nathan J. “What We Did in Vietnam.” Current Affairs, July 8, 2018. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/07/what-we-did-in-vietnam.

13. Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. Rev. ed. London: Zed Books, 2003. During the Cold War, the U.S. was involved in over fifty regime change operations around the world.

14. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

15. Haltiwanger, John. “What to Know About the Man Who Toppled Assad.” Foreign Policy, December 11, 2024. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/12/11/syria-rebel-leader-jolani-hts-al-qaeda-islamic-state-isis/.

16. United Nations Human Rights Council, Detailed Findings on the Military Operations and Attacks in the Gaza Strip and Israel from 7 October 2023 to 31 August 2024, A/HRC/60/CRP.3 (Geneva: United Nations, 2024); Human Rights Watch. “Extermination and Acts of Genocide”: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water (New York: Human Rights Watch, December 19, 2024); Amnesty International. “You Feel Like You Are Less Than Human”: Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians in Gaza (London: Amnesty International, December 5, 2024).

17. Babiarz, Kimberly Singer, Grant Miller, and Shige Song. “An Exploration of China’s Mortality Decline under Mao: A Provincial Analysis, 1950–80.” Population and Development Review 41, no. 1 (2015): 39–67. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4331212/.

18. Losurdo, Domenico. 2017. “Has China Turned to Capitalism?—Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism.” International Critical Thought. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was a set of economic policies designed to re-introduce elements of capitalism into the Soviet Union during the period 1921-1928. Seen as a temporary retreat, the program was deemed necessary to develop the productive forces of a backwards Russia that had just emerged out of a brutal counter-revolutionary imperialist war. Losurdo presents the argument that China’s reforms under Deng ought to be seen in an analogous light.

19. Amin, Samir. “China 2013.” Monthly Review 64, no. 10 (March 2013).

20. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China. Studies on Contemporary China 4. July 23, 2021.

21. Cheng, Enfu. "On the Nature of the Chinese Economic System." Monthly Review 72, no. 5 (October 2020).

22. Shapiro, Judith. Will China Save the Planet? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018); Global Energy Monitor. China Continues to Lead the World in Wind and Solar, with Twice as Much Capacity Under Construction as the Rest of the World Combined. (San Francisco: Global Energy Monitor, July 11, 2024).

23. Arisic, Antonia, and Kai von Carnap. China’s Drive Toward Self-Reliance in Artificial Intelligence Chips and Large Language Models. MERICS Report. Berlin: Mercator Institute for China Studies, May 23, 2024.

24. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The Resurgence of Militarisation in Northeast Asia. Dossier no. 76. May 14, 2024.

25. Hudson, Super Imperialism.

26. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

27. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Hyper-imperialism: A New Dangerous Stage, Dossier no. 72 (January 2024).

28. Alden, Edward. “The Mar-a-Lago Accords: Economic Ripple Effect Widens.” Council on Foreign Relations, January 28, 2026.

29. Office of the Prime Minister of Canada. “Prime Minister Carney Forges New Strategic Partnership with the People’s Republic of China.” News release, January 16, 2026.

30. American Immigration Council. “Rising Toll: ICE-Involved Shootings and Custodial Deaths in early 2026.” Immigration Impact, February 12, 2026.

31. Gomez, Alan. "Obama's Deportation Policy: The Numbers." ABC News, August 29, 2016.

32. Sanger, David E. "A U.S. Intelligence Assessment in February Found That an Attack on Iran Was Unlikely to Result in Regime Change." The New York Times, March 7, 2026; Bash, Dana. "Exclusive: Trump Discusses Regional Strategy and Military Posture Regarding Iran and Cuba." CNN, March 6, 2026; Middle East Monitor. “IAEA Says No Evidence Iran Is Building a Nuclear Bomb.” March 4, 2026. The principal justifications were two: to stop the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program and to bring democracy to Iranians. According to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, there is “no evidence” that Iran was building a nuclear weapon prior to the war. As for the second justification, Trump himself has stated his explicit intention to disregard democracy and hand-pick the new leader of Iran.

33. World Economic Forum. "Davos 2026: Special Address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada." January 21, 2026.

34. Dorey-Stein, Emma. “Mark Carney’s Rightward-Rushing Agenda: Getting Started in Denial.” The Breach, January 22, 2026; Cox, Wendy. “How Mark Carney is complicating Canada’s climate progress.” The Narwhal, January 19, 2026.

35. Lukács, György. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971).

36. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 276 (New York: International Publishers, 1971).