Trump’s slogan of “peace through strength” had its origins in the Roman Empire. It is said to have first been used by the Emperor Hadrian, best known for Hadrian’s Wall, which was built in the Roman province of Britain in 122 CE. The wall was intended to help defend the boundaries of the Roman Empire, at the moment of its greatest expansion, against barbarian “invaders.”78 As imperial decline commences, the notion of barbarian invaders soon becomes ubiquitous, leading to demands to build border walls and Golden Domes. The irrationalism of the Trump Doctrine of renewed U.S. global domination through an aggressive racial nationalism points to what István Mészáros termed the “potentially deadliest phase of imperialism,” a period of nuclear-armed barbarism.

　　Writing in 1935, during the consolidation of the Nazi regime in The Heritage of Our Times, Bloch observed: “We have really reached the trump card here after a hundred years of the German workers’ movement: a monster has come true and is committing the proletarians in chains to the Thousand-Year Reich, to capital finance as national community.”80 In 2025, the United States is subject to a neofascist movement of enormous significance, in which the “trump card here,” after a long history of democratic struggle rooted in workers’ movements, is that “a monster has come true,” committing workers increasingly “in chains” to “capital finance as national community” and to a New Cold War against China and the Global South.

　　The billionaire ruling class of the United States has—along the path of support for Israeli genocide of Palestinians and a prospective war with China—shifted its support from liberal democracy to neofascism, or at best to a neofascist-neoliberal alliance. Key sections of the capitalist class have mobilized the lower-middle class on the basis of a nationalist, revanchist ideology, in which the population of most of the world is seen as the enemy. Structures are being put in place that are meant to eliminate the possibility of a mass democratic revolt from below and the reversal of today’s destructive trends. There is only one movement on Earth capable of turning these dangerous and destructive trends around on behalf of humanity as a whole: the global movement toward socialism, which is also necessarily an anti-imperialist movement. The worst error that could be made in this dire situation would be to underestimate the danger, or the extent, of the revolutionary human struggle now required.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Deng Panyi

　　From:https://monthlyreview.org/2025/06/01/the-trump-doctrine-and-the-new-maga-imperialism/(2025-6-1)