The system in place in the countries of the historic imperialist triad (the United States, Western Europe, Japan) is based on the exercise of the abs… - Samir Amin

The debate concerns only some of the problems of society in the United States (anti-feminism and racism in particular). It does not call into question the economic foundations of the system that are the root cause of the degradations of social conditions in important segments of society. The sacredness of private property, including that of monopolies, remains intact; the fact that Trump is himself a billionaire was an asset and not an obstacle to his election.

Washington’s propaganda apparatus has been foretelling an inevitable ‘clash of civilizations’ (actually of religions) as the dominant feature of the future world. In reality, it has managed to give a real face to such a clash by a number of systematic measures: the promotion of various communalisms on the pretext of respecting difference; an offensive against ‘outdated’ secularism; praise for religious obscurantisms, which postmodernists have placed on a par with any other ‘ideology’; systematic encouragement of nauseating ethnicist regimes (in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere); various kinds of cynical manipulation (CIA support for terrorist groups against enemies of the USA, in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Algeria, among others); and a false and dishonest war on so-called ‘terrorism’ (where terror does not serve Washington’s interests). The so-called clash of civilizations is an integral part of the barbaric downhill slide of capitalism; in no way is it an obstacle to the unfurling of the US hegemonist project.

The hegemonist strategy of the United States, which operates within the framework of the new collective imperialism, seeks nothing less than to establish Washington’s military control over the entire planet. This is the means to ensure privileged access to all of the world’s natural resources, and to compel subaltern allies, Russia, China and the whole third world to swallow their status as vassals. Military control of the planet is the means to impose, as a last resort, the draining of ‘tribute’ through political violence – as a substitute for the ‘spontaneous’ flow of capital that offsets the American deficit, the Achilles heel of US hegemony.