The Hour of Truth in the Americas

The United States under Trump: Against the World, Its Own People, and the Migrant Diasporas By Gonzalo Santos^[1]

Abstract

This essay attempts to analyze the present conjuncture in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, from the perspective of the historical sociology of the world-system. Its underlying thesis is that the internal crisis in the U.S., which so profoundly affects the migrant diasporas now fiercely persecuted, and the renewed imperialist foreign policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean (and Greenland and Iran), are intimately linked to two historical processes of different temporalities: the end of the cycle of U.S. global hegemony and the end of historical capitalism. In these circumstances, when structures and elites lose their solidity and power over societies, fascism, social repression, and wars resurface, pushing us toward chaos and a possible planetary cataclysm; but spaces also open up for the collective action of subaltern social forces, including migrants and their diasporas, and with this, the possibility of transitioning to a new and better post-capitalist world-system.

Keywords: #SystemicCrisis #HegemonicCrisis #UnitedStates #LatinAmerica #Caribbean #DonroeDoctrine #Migration #LatinoDiasporas

I.               The Two Overlapping Crises in Today’s World and Our Heightened Collective Agency to Confront Them

The United States of America, the indisputable global superpower of the last century, began to decline in global hegemony in the 1970s, a process that accelerated dramatically with the arrival of the 21st century. Long gone is the period immediately following the Second World War, when it served as the prosperous and dynamic center of the world economy and the innovative, visionary builder and guarantor of a new international order. Since the beginning of this century, in its eagerness to recover its lost hegemony, it has become the principal generator of, and epicenter for, systemic chaos in the modern capitalist world-system (Wallerstein, 2003).

Although the geopolitical chaos it generated fell violently and primarily on Central Asia and the Middle East, today that political and social chaos has reached and is growing both within its own borders and throughout the zone of its historical influence – Latin America and the Caribbean. A core part of this growing chaos, both in the United States and across the continent, has taken shape around the issue of migration – both irregular and legal – itself a product of the very neoliberal model that the U.S. exported to the region, only for that migration to become stigmatized, criminalized, and repressed.^[3]

To further complicate matters, the turbulent process of the end of the U.S. hegemonic cycle differs from the two preceding cycles of historical capitalism (the British and the Dutch) in that it is occurring on top of much longer-running “secular” structural processes, which are contributing to the historical end of the life of the capitalist world-system itself (Arrighi et al., 1999; Arrighi, 2009; Robinson, 2025).

We find ourselves in the even more significant and turbulent period of systemic transition toward an uncertain future – toward a new and superior post-capitalist world-system, in the best case, or toward the collapse of human civilization and life on the planet itself, in the worst (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1996). From this arises the great challenge of correctly analyzing, navigating, and finding a way to survive this complicated historical juncture.

Under these chaotic and dangerous conditions of maximum uncertainty, fueled by the two overlapping crises, the system’s structural resilience and the usual power of ruling circles and global elites diminishes and even disappears; this allows all social actors today to have renewed agency – not only the elites and states of both the Global North and South, but all the social forces within so-called global civil society (Wallerstein, 1998).

This of course includes the peoples of the United States and Latin America, their working classes and ethnic groups, their students, artists, and intellectuals, their Indigenous peoples and rural communities, women as such, and, very especially, the migrant diasporas, who today are the principal hemispheric social bridge and the new historical subject carrying the spark of a new future and a new transnational identity in their backpacks and in their forbidden dreams.

What is happening, and what is going to happen, therefore depends on all of us. All of us are contributing to the construction or suppression of a vision of a new world with a more just, innovative, and sustainable architecture. All of us are contributing – whether we are conscious of it or not – through our social and personal action, directly or indirectly, to the direction the world and our regions are taking, to the history of the world and of our regions still to be written.

This brief essay is an attempt to explain to ourselves what we are going through across the Americas, from a historical and global perspective, and what we can and must do both in the United States and in Latin America and the Caribbean. Similar analyses and prescriptions are urgently needed for the other regions of the world.^[4]

II.             The Accelerated Implosion of the United States under the MAGA-Trumpist Project^[5]

Every empire and every hegemony come to an end, and the American ones are no exception. After its indisputable period of ascendancy and global supremacy in the decades following the Second World War, the U.S. successively lost its economic, geopolitical, scientific-technological, ideological, and cultural hegemony; but, in an anomaly unique in the history of the modern world-system, it has retained its military supremacy, which has led it to rely more and more on that supremacy in an attempt to reverse its hegemonic decline – a reliance that, paradoxically, has only sunk it more quickly, both because of its extremely high cost and its ineffectiveness in the nuclear age (Arrighi, 2005a and 2005b).

What we see today is an inflection point in this trajectory of accelerated decline of the American hegemon, in which the state and the ruling classes have abandoned previous strategies and adopted a far more extreme and desperate project and strategy, one we can frankly characterize as “21st-century fascism” – very similar to the German fascism of the 1930s adopted by the Nazi state and the German upper bourgeoisie as an authoritarian and imperialist way out of their failed hegemonic bids, which had led them to a humiliating defeat in the First World War and to a chronic economic crisis afterward.^[6]

Since Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2017, and again in 2025, the following has occurred:

II.1. On the international economic and geopolitical front, Trump completely abandoned international economic competition under a free-trade regime that the United States had once championed with such fanfare, as the tireless promoter of unrestricted free trade and the flow of capital and technology – although always in an asymmetrical and advantageous way. In his first term, Trump and his team adopted protectionist mercantilist measures: high tariffs on imports and restrictions on high-technology exports, currency speculation against the dollar, and the continuation of massive borrowing (the largest in the world) to finance an already unsustainable level of general consumption, subsidies to increase the wealth of the oligarchic Top One Percent, and to keep building up its military might.

These policies, which Joe Biden, incidentally, continued and which Trump aggressively escalated in his second term, have not prevented the center of gravity of the world economy and of capitalist accumulation from relocating to China and East Asia. A brief review would highlight the following:

China’s accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and its complete opening to the world circuits of investment, manufacturing, and capitalist accumulation – processes initially sponsored by the U.S. as a core component of its neoliberal globalization project – ended up allowing China to catch up and surpass the United States, which since 2001 had been occupied with its disastrous “endless wars” of hegemonic restoration, in branch after branch of production, technological innovation, international trade, and global accumulation, turning China into the world’s leading investor, trading partner, and lender – markedly so in Africa, Asia, and South America.

Today China alone accounts for one-fifth of world economic output (20% of world GDP) – East Asia accounts for 26%, reaching parity with the U.S. (26%) and with North America (29 to 30% if we include Canada and Mexico under the USMCA). Last year, the Asian giant surpassed, for the first time, more than one trillion dollars in trade surplus with the rest of the world, despite all the tariffs the United States imposed on it. China, in fact, no longer depends on trade with the United States the way it did 15 years ago. The United States, by contrast, barely managed to reduce its enormous trade deficit last year under its regime of high tariffs on the entire world, without achieving any net surplus at all.

Other beneficiaries that advanced on the international economic stage were (a) the European Union, which consolidated and expanded to 27 member states (with 10 more on the waiting list) despite Britain’s exit (Brexit) in 2016, and which today accounts for roughly one-sixth (16%) of world GDP; and (b) the BRICS+ geopolitical alliance of the Global South (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and six other countries), which today accounts for 37% to 44% of world GDP and is larger than the GDP of the Global North’s G-7.

South America is a case of advances, stagnation, and setbacks. In 2008, during the so-called “pink tide” of anti-neoliberal governments, an ambitious project of continental economic integration was launched, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), under the Bolivarian vision of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. At first, every South American country took part; but by 2018, for lack of sustained progress and due to changes in political regimes, many countries suspended their membership.

Latin America’s geopolitical integration project, CELAC – the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which brings together the continent’s 33 countries and excludes the U.S. and Canada – has fared only somewhat better. Founded in 2010, it remains an important forum, has had no defections so far, though it has been weakened by the recent wave of far-right regimes elected in the region and by the launch of the Shield of the Americas, a U.S. initiative for multinational military and geopolitical cooperation in the region, which already counts with 14 to 17 member states.^[7]

II.2. On the domestic economic and political front, the MAGA-Trumpist project puts the state at the service of corporate oligopolies and the upper bourgeoisie, including by appointing billionaires to head federal departments and agencies subjected to draconian cuts; it aggressively cancels what remains of the New Deal social contract; it dismantles the welfare state for the working classes; it subverts the social, cultural, political, and labor rights won by workers, women, and ethnic and sexual minorities over the past century; it further expands the military-industrial-prison-security complex (already gigantic during and after the Cold War and later the War on Terror); it erodes the democratic constitutional order (federalism and the balance of powers, free elections, the rule of law, and bipartisan governance) and tries to replace it with an authoritarian, one-party, highly centralized, and lawless state, excessively corrupt and kleptocratic, built on a cult of the supreme leader, with an ultranationalist ideology carrying strong overtones of white racial supremacy and revanchism, unbridled xenophobia, and religious fanaticism.

American democracy is in a severe crisis. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to nullify the Voting Rights Act of 1965 destroyed the legal foundation of the multiracial democracy previously and painstakingly built. Combined with the return of a fundamentalist, patriarchal, and intolerant Christian political theology, and the extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a voracious plutocracy and a corrupt political system at its service, we are already living in times of extreme social polarization and severe political conflict.

But a historic window is also opening – one unlike anything seen since the period before the Civil War more than 150 years ago – for the mobilization of all social actors, dominant and subaltern alike, which could lead to deep and radical changes in the country’s political, economic, and social structures, bringing about a true rebirth of the nation, as happened in 1865.

This time, as we shall see further on, the processes of social struggle and the rebirth they could usher may not remain exclusively domestic, internal to the American nation-state, but will probably have to encompass the North American region to be effective, and quite possibly the Western Hemisphere as a whole. That, in turn, will help change the world for the better.

II.3. On the domestic social front, although many social groups have been targeted by the MAGA-Trumpist project’s attacks (women and sexual/gender-identity groups, African Americans and other ethnic groups, environmentalists, unionists, and so on), this fascist movement has singled out, particularly and from the very beginning, the migrant diasporas and Latino ethnic groups, along with other non-European or non-Christian groups, turning them into its principal domestic enemy and scapegoat – just as the German Nazis did against Jews, Slavs, and Roma on their rise to absolute state power.^[8]

Since Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign, throughout his entire first term, during the Biden period (as opposition), and since Trump entered the White House for the second time in 2025, MAGA-Trumpism has not stopped stigmatizing, blocking entry to, criminalizing, persecuting, detaining, and deporting not only undocumented migrants – mostly Latino – but a long list of legal migrants as well: asylum seekers who were legally admitted or who arrive and present themselves at the borders; refugees from wars and persecution (except for white South Africans and Ukrainians), forced displacement, and natural disasters, including those already legally admitted to the country under Temporary Protected Status (TPS); Dreamers, who arrived as undocumented children and who, since 2012, began gaining access to the temporary protection program DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals); visitors and tourists from 39 majority-Muslim or sanctioned countries (North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine); foreign university students, scientists, and academics, whether residents or visa applicants, who speak out or are detected opposing U.S. foreign policy (especially regarding Israel and its genocidal actions against Palestinians); lawful permanent residents (LPRs), holders of the famous green card, now at risk of losing it over a growing number of infractions – and, since June of this year, subject to summary deportation upon returning from travel, at the discretion of border agents; and finally, legal immigrants already naturalized as U.S. citizens, now subject to processes of persecution, denaturalization, and deportation at the discretion of the Secretary of State and the Department of Justice.

As we can see, what began in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s as increasingly restrictive and punitive laws – but focused exclusively on suppressing unauthorized (undocumented) irregular migration, which was overwhelmingly Mexican in those decades, laws broadly supported by both political parties at the same time they backed multiple generous laws on legal migration (1965), refuge, and asylum (the 80s and 90s) – turned, in the 21st century, into a virulent nativist and xenophobic movement tinged with white supremacism and Christian nationalism, much like the one that arose in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

That earlier episode occurred when only white men could vote and racial apartheid prevailed across the nation. The WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) nativist movement drew on the fraudulent pseudoscience of eugenics, which preached the hereditary genetic inferiority of migrants, the disabled, and all non-Anglo-Saxon races, to impose a 1924 law that lasted until 1965 and effectively closed off nearly all legal migration not originating from Anglo-Saxon northwestern Europe, affecting mainly other European migrants and all Asian migrants (though it did allow for two temporary agricultural-worker programs, the Mexican Bracero program and the migration of Filipino men, since the Philippines belonged to the U.S. as a colony). Although the diasporas that had arrived before 1924 were not expelled, and settled into marginalized ethnic communities, the share of immigrants in the U.S. population plummeted from 13.4% in 1920 to 4.7% in 1970, the lowest in its history. This severe demographic impact was the planned result sought by the ideologues of the Great Anglo-Saxon Nation.

Something similar has been happening since new draconian federal and state laws against undocumented migration were attempted at the start of the 21st century (building on a 1994 anti-immigrant law in California and two federal laws in 1996), pushed mainly by the Republican Party and its overwhelmingly white, conservative, Evangelical social base, with a liberal, multiethnic Democratic Party opting to making ever-greater concessions in order to safeguard, in their own account, the rights of legal migrants.

Even though the attempt to criminalize and penalize irregular migration triggered, in 2006, the rise of the largest pro-immigrant movement in U.S. history – mobilizing 6 million migrants into the streets of hundreds of cities that year to demand a fair immigration reform – the attacks did not stop; Congress and numerous states kept passing anti-immigrant laws, blocking every attempt at partial or comprehensive, fair immigration reform, and authorizing more and more funding every year so that the detention and deportation machinery would keep growing by leaps and bounds, under the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, as well as the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.^[9]

The table was set for the MAGA-Trumpist project to emerge in 2015, to triumph mainly by smearing and demonizing undocumented migrants as criminals, terrorists, and rapists, and allowing Trump, as soon as he took power, to turn viciously not only against desperate migrants, increasingly asylum-seeking families trying to cross the border without permission, but to extend those vicious attacks to every other type of non-white migrants – permanent and temporary legal migrants, admitted asylees and refugees and those still on their way, tearing families and children apart at the border, and attacking naturalized citizens, as already mentioned.

In its second term, the MAGA-Trumpist project has quadrupled the budgets the duopoly authorized in the first term. It has expanded the prison network to confine, under conditions of overcrowding, mistreatment, and neglect (more than 50 deaths have already occurred under this term), up to 100,000 immigrants a day (currently around 68,000 are held per day); it has multiplied deportation flights into the thousands, both to countries of origin and to remote “third countries” (or to Mexico); it has formally deported 452,000 people from the interior of the country so far in its second term, about 1,100 a day (roughly 70% with no criminal record and only 5% convicted of violent crimes), and it wants to deport more than 3,000 a day (a million a year). To that end, it has signed more than 1,500 new cooperation agreements with local and state law enforcement agencies to detain migrants, on top of the 300 that already existed; and it has launched the largest militarized raids in the country’s interior since the infamous Operation Wetback of the mid-1950s.

For all of this, Trump’s second administration has had access to more than $175 billion approved by Congress in July 2025 and $70 billion more approved in June of this year for the remainder of his term.

This infusion of resources has not stopped the second Trump administration from raising the already-high fee to apply for citizenship by 80%, nor from effectively shutting down all legal immigration from 75 countries, nor from canceling the refugee-acceptance program worldwide (except for some 6,000 white South Africans), nor from closing all borders to asylum seekers, leaving them stranded in Mexico, nor from trying to end the TPS program for migrants from 14 of the 17 affected countries (the Supreme Court has just allowed it to do so for resident migrants originally from Haiti and Syria; others will now follow).

It does, however, offer resident migrants the option to “self-deport,” offering $3,000 and free plane tickets to those who accept to do so (73,000 migrants have done so). And it has continued expanding the gulag of migrant detention centers, which now fluctuates between 200 and 270 active sites depending on local contracts.

Maintaining the for-profit gulag costs taxpayers $11.2 billion a year, which flows into the coffers of the major private-prison companies, on top of a massive four-year expansion fund of $45 billion authorized last year. It is estimated that the 11.8 million undocumented migrant population contributes $90 billion a year, without receiving a single federal benefit in return. What it does receive in exchange, cruelly, is the ferocious persecution and the mass detention and deportation we are witnessing.

The courts are making all this easy for Trump. Although the Supreme Court recently denied Trump’s attempt to repeal the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to abolish birthright citizenship for the children of irregular immigrants, temporary residents, and tourists, it has just authorized him to extend to the entire national territory the “expedited deportations” that occur at the borders with new arrivals – violating the due process rights of long-term resident migrants. It has also just allowed him to deport returning LPR resident immigrants at the discretion of border agents, severely stripping that status of its previous security and protection.

The situation of Dreamers with DACA has also worsened. The story of the roughly twenty failed attempts to pass versions of the Dream Act since 2001 – legislation that would permanently legalize the Dreamers – has been a sad demonstration of both parties’ lack of political will to at least protect and fully integrate these young people, “American in every sense but on paper.”

In his first term, Trump attempted to cancel the temporary DACA program, but the Supreme Court denied him, just as it denied his attempt to add a citizenship question to the decennial census. But now, in its second term, the courts have allowed Trump to suspend hundreds of thousands of eligible Dreamers access to the DACA program, to double fees and shorten the renewal period from three years to two, and to excessively delay renewal processing – causing many Dreamers to lose their jobs. Trump has also ordered that DACA-mented Dreamers be denied access to the federal health care program known as Obamacare (Affordable Care Act), has attacked universities that offer scholarships to DACA Dreamers, and has sued nine states for offering in-state tuition to Dreamers with or without DACA.

Far more worrying is that the Supreme Court is on the verge of abolishing the DACA program altogether, thereby stripping legal status from the more than half a million Dreamers currently active in the program and exposing them to deportation, just like the other over half a million Dreamers without DACA. Trump is not waiting – so far in his second term he has deported 86 DACA Dreamers and detained more than 260.

Many more children – 145,000 – have been separated so far from at least one deported or detained parent, 22,000 from both parents. And more than 1,300 ununified children remain from when 5,000 were separated from their parents at the border during Trump’s first term, in 2018.

There are more than 4 million U.S. citizen children living with at least one undocumented parent, more than 5 million living with an undocumented family member. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued a rule denying such “mixed-status” families access to federal housing programs, affecting at least 80,000 people and 37,000 children.

The Department of Transportation has likewise barred temporary or undocumented immigrants from obtaining commercial truck-driving licenses, affecting 200,000 migrant truckers and their families. USCIS, the agency that issues green cards, has announced it will suspend its long-standing practice of allowing non-citizens who entered the U.S. legally (fiancées and spouses, students, temporary workers, etc.) to apply for such cards without leaving the country – they will now have to do so from their countries of origin.

The State Department’s many hurdles and requirements imposed on prospective foreign students have caused their enrollment at U.S. universities to plummet by 20% or more. And even migrant business owners, many of them Republicans and Trump supporters, are now running into the new federal rule that makes them ineligible for federal loans for their small businesses.

That is the explicitly hostile policy of the MAGA-Trumpist regime toward legal and undocumented immigrants, meant to terrorize them, prevent their settlement and social integration, stigmatize them, deny them a livelihood, medical care, higher education, or housing, and drive them out by every means possible. The American dream for migrants in the United States has turned into the worst MAGA-Trumpist nightmare. Even the delegalized migrant relatives of the Cuban and Venezuelan voters who backed Trump are now experiencing the nightmare of fierce persecution, detention, and deportation. No one is safe from this MAGA-Trumpist project of ethnic cleansing against non-white migrant communities and their settled ethnic communities – especially Latino communities.

But, as in past waves of xenophobia, none of this persecution and oppression of ethnic and diasporic communities makes any economic sense: today, the nearly 48 million immigrants residing in the U.S. – 14.3% of the population – contribute $652 billion annually in taxes, $420 billion to the federal government and the rest to states and municipalities; their purchasing power exceeds $1.7 trillion; the 30.7 million immigrants in the labor force (17.7%) are vital to the economy and essential to society, as we already saw during the COVID pandemic; the 3.9 million immigrant entrepreneurs renew the dynamism of hundreds of communities and employ millions of U.S. citizens; and their cultural contribution to the nation, needless to say, has always been and remains incalculable.

Trying to tear from the country millions of working families rooted here for decades, or denying asylum and protection to those fleeing environmental and human catastrophes, is a denial of the universal human values and the most basic sense of social justice and human fraternity that make up this country’s founding ideals, besides gravely straining relations with neighboring countries across the Americas.

The ideological root of the xenophobia afflicting the United States today is irrational and duplicitous, explainable only by the desperation of an elite desperate to recover, at any cost, its vanishing hegemonic power in a capitalist world that is itself crumbling, and by its drive to concentrate and maintain political domination over a working class they have plundered of its income, wealth and well-being, and that increasingly demands radical change and new policies to confront and resolve the grave problems it faces. MAGA-Trumpism resorts to racism and xenophobia to scare and divide the people and above all confuse them about the origin of their problems. It uses the bogus “Great Replacement” theory – a poisonous conspiracy theory that posits a plot orchestrated by Jews to flood the country with non-white migrants in order to replace the white Christian race – just as a hundred years ago it used the bogus, poisonous theory of eugenics (HIAS Staff, 2026).

But in the reality of today’s world, expelling and losing one’s own labor force, and hitching the economic future and social contract of a multiethnic, democratic country like the U.S. to an exclusionary project with a pronounced fascist and racial-supremacist bent, amounts to a pact of national suicide that the American people must reject – and are already beginning to reject – not to mention its Latino and African American migrant and ethnic communities.

Today we are witnessing an accelerated militarization of the police and law enforcement agencies – especially the immigration-control agencies, whose agents now roam unrestrained like a paramilitary force, unidentified and masked, brutalizing people with no regard whatsoever for any standard of lawful conduct or respect for the citizenry.

We already witnessed, during 2025, the growing use of the military itself and of other federal agencies and National Guard units in anti-immigrant raids in multiple cities, under the pretext of supporting the migra raids, but no doubt rehearsing for future repressive actions against the sectors and social movements of U.S. citizens who protest and resist the fascist project. Those sectors include not only communities of color but the white population itself when it takes to the streets to protest, branded incessantly by Trump and his associates as “domestic terrorists,” “Antifa,” “Marxists,” “communists,” and “enemies of the homeland.”

Police brutality has increased in African American communities, and hate crimes against LGBTQ, Muslim, and Jewish communities have skyrocketed. The migra deployed in the cities now openly beats, arrests, and even shoots U.S. citizens – not only Latinos and African Americans, but white citizens too, as we witnessed on January 7 and 24 of this year with the point-blank killing of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis – both peaceful legal observers of an ongoing ICE raid immediately smeared by the DHS Secretary as “domestic terrorists.”

U.S. citizens, white and non-white alike, are beginning to realize that the cruel and violent actions of the Trump regime are also aimed at them and their freedoms, which has unleashed a massive wave of street protests foretelling ever greater and more widespread social resistance. Unfortunately, given the current balance of forces, this will also invite further repression from the hyper-militarized state.

All of this is generating an enormous spiral of chaos within the U.S. political system, causing extreme social polarization and giving rise to ever-greater episodes of peaceful protest and state violence.

The empire is imploding at its core.

By way of contrast, we can compare this violent implosion to the way the U.S.S.R., the United States’ nemesis state during the Cold War, ended up fragmenting and disappearing. The Soviet Union was the first of the era’s two superpowers to collapse, and it did so from within – under the accumulated weight of its own old internal contradictions. And when it collapsed, it did so peacefully, without a single shot fired, without civil war (except in Chechnya), and certainly without an international war. Thirty years later, Russia has consolidated an authoritarian state and a renewed imperialist foreign policy similar to MAGA-Trumpism.

Now, against all the universal triumphalism and the proclamations of a “new American century” that accompanied U.S. power circles in the immediate post-Cold War period, it is they who are collapsing, along with their quixotic dreams of recovering the global hegemony irretrievably lost. And when, in desperation and shamelessness, they resort to adopting a barely disguised fascist project similar to the one they helped defeat 80 years ago, all they are doing is imploding their own country in an apotheosis of state repression and social violence, with very grave consequences for the future of a country that has shed so much blood for its freedom and shared prosperity. They do not deserve to govern. And for the American people, as for the Russian people, the only path left is social resistance to MAGA-Trumpism and Putinism, and the rebuilding of their nation-states under new visions of their respective roles in the world, new, more democratic domestic political-economic architectures, and new, more equitable and inclusive social contracts.

Whatever happens in the United States will affect the world, and especially Latin America and the Caribbean, and its diasporas in the U.S., who already make up 20% of its population. They must help set this country’s course right before it explodes and causes further harm to the world. International solidarity with the struggles of the American people – multiracial, multicultural, multidiasporic from the start, and possessing a long, arduous democratic tradition – is just as urgent and just as vital as the solidarity required from the American people toward the peoples of the world, who are fighting the imperialist aggressions of their own U.S. government. We turn to them now.

III.           The Renewed U.S. Imperialist Onslaught on the Western Hemisphere

III.1. The Turning Point of MAGA-Trumpism: From Military Isolationism to the Renewal of War and Interventionism on a Continental Scale. At an international level, the result of the advance of the MAGA-Trumpist project – the inflection point we are witnessing today – consists, apart from the great escalation of ultra-protectionist policies in its second term, of a renewal of interventionist, warmongering, imperialist geopolitics. The escalation of interventionist threats and acts of war has occurred, for the time being, mainly in two zones: (a) the Western Hemisphere and (b) the Middle East (unconditionally backing the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank, on one hand, and launching two wars against Iran in alliance with Israel, on the other). In this essay we analyze the escalation of “Trump 2.0’s” imperialist aggressions only in the first zone.

The renewal of U.S. imperialist geopolitics toward the Western Hemisphere was formally announced in December 2025 as the “Trump Corollary” to the resurrected Monroe Doctrine, in its new National Security Strategy (downloadable here) (White House, 2025). Trump christened it the Donroe Doctrine. In that document, the United States unilaterally declares that, from now on, the Western Hemisphere constitutes its exclusive economic and geopolitical zone. In other words, it belongs to the U.S., which is simply reappropriating it, full stop.

The strategic calculation behind this bold declaration is, however, defensive: with it, the U.S. appears to have decided to retreat to its original 19th- and early-20th-century hegemonic zone, tacitly conceding the weakening or loss of its economic and geopolitical hegemony in Europe vis-à-vis Russia and the European Union (EU), in Asia vis-à-vis China, India, and other countries (Iran and the Persian Gulf region turned out to be an area it was not yet willing to concede), and in Africa vis-à-vis China and the EU. It appears that the former hegemon, in its death throes, is distancing itself from, and washing its hands of, the costly commitments it had previously assumed during the full exercise of its hegemony in all these regions, now that they no longer pay off, and is deciding to concentrate solely on its historic “backyard” in order to recover its disputed or lost hegemony.

In that surprising declaration – after three decades of U.S. geopolitical neglect toward the American continent – and in the acceleration of the countless protectionist economic measures taken during Trump’s two terms, one can measure the intent to unburden the U.S. of every alliance, treaty, and even membership in, and subsidy to, any international institution based on multilateralism and international cooperation,^[10] in order to adopt, without any constraint whatsoever, a regional geopolitical strategy centered exclusively on advancing its own “national interest” (read: the interests of its predatory plutocracy) across the American continent and, if necessary, doing so far more aggressively.^[11]

In his second term, MAGA-Trumpism does not retreat behind its national borders, as it did in the first term; instead it strategically pulls back to its self-declared “sphere of influence” – the Western Hemisphere as a whole – where it intends, from now on, to dominate and project all its might for its exclusive benefit, without requiring anyone’s approval, including that of Latin American states, whose national sovereignties are henceforth nullified by imperial decree – without the slightest regard for the principles of civilized coexistence, moral justification, or international law, including the principles that supposedly govern the now-moribund Organization of American States (OAS), an alliance the United States established and led under the “Pan-American spirit” when it achieved global hegemony after the Second World War.

At the level of the interstate system of the world-system, this shift by the Trump 2.0 regime amounts to a declaration that the United States is renouncing the international order it itself promoted after the Second World War, renouncing the United Nations Charter, the Charter of the Organization of American States, and all the other Pan-American obligations it took on, announcing that it has decided to return to the system of inter-imperialist rivalries and spheres of influence of the 19th and early 20th centuries, where no law prevailed but the law of the strongest – a system that led to the unbridled exploitation and plunder of the (neo)colonial world and ended up causing two world wars.

In the current context of exacerbated geopolitical rivalries, the new MAGA-Trumpist foreign doctrine actually constitutes a declaration of geoeconomic war against China (and, incidentally, against the other economic powers such as the EU), but focused on what it considers its last bastion and “favorable” region – the Americas.^[12] It further constitutes a frontal attack on the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self-determination of the nations and states of the American continent (and of Greenland/Denmark).

The fact that China is already South America’s principal trading partner, with substantial investments across the continent, alarms it; this is precisely what the MAGA-Trumpist regime wants to reverse – not through economic competition and free trade, but through geopolitical/military coercion and the imposition of unilateral tariffs. And the fact that Denmark is a NATO member, and that the forced annexation of Greenland would trigger NATO’s dissolution, matters very little to it – if it already wants to leave NATO and dissolve it, all the better that it should take that huge strategic island out the door with it! Although we have already seen Trump temporarily back off from his open military threats in the face of universal repudiation (not only in Europe and the rest of the world but among the American public itself), it is to be expected that he will not give up.

Some will think that this whole turn is unheard of and unexpected in the middle of the 21st century, assuming that we had already left behind that horrendous history of “Yankee imperialism.” But a brief review of the historical evolution of U.S. relations with Latin America, combined with a review of the grave problems the former global hegemon and its diminished strategic interests face today, explains why it decided to retreat as it did and to try once again to dominate the entire American continent, as the only strategy it believes it has left.

And I say “believes it has left” because the United States – especially now that it has embraced the MAGA-Trumpist project – has been, and continues to be, dominated internally by an insatiable and rapacious plutocracy, and its elites have always been, and continue to be, imperialists at heart – only that before, in the days of their global hegemonic glory, they concealed it behind the lofty rhetoric of the defense of the “Free World,” and today, finding themselves in the bind of a severely diminished hegemony, they have once again resorted shamelessly to the rhetoric of American empire, in the manner of Teddy Roosevelt and his big stick.

III.2. A Brief Review of the Monroe Doctrine:^[13] If the Monroe Doctrine (proclaimed in 1823, though initially proposed as a joint declaration by the British foreign office) originally expressed solidarity with the wars of independence in the Americas, and declared that the U.S. would block any European colonial expansion in the Americas – especially Spain’s attempts to recover its empire – by 1898 it was being used as the basis for the U.S.’s own imperialist war against Spain, in order to seize Spain’s remaining colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines).

Under the “Roosevelt Corollary,” proclaimed in 1904 by Teddy Roosevelt, the U.S. declared for itself the right to intervene militarily in the continent to protect its economic interests and “restore order” whenever and wherever it deemed fit, inaugurating the era of “gunboat diplomacy” that led to multiple military invasions and regime changes in the northern part of the Western Hemisphere.^[14]

This openly imperialist posture of the United States under the modified Monroe Doctrine continued until the second Roosevelt (Franklin) proclaimed his so-called “Good Neighbor Policy” in 1934, promising to respect sovereignty and seek alliance with the Latin American countries in anticipation of the Second World War – which did not stop him, even as he withdrew the Marines, from installing the long “banana republic” dictatorships of the 1930s: Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, finally overthrown by popular uprisings in 1979, 1959, and 1961, respectively.

After the Second World War, and throughout the entire Cold War period, the Monroe Doctrine was revived as an aggressive and paranoid national-security doctrine, ostensibly anti-communist and anti-subversive, projected across the whole continent. What the United States really wanted to prevent at all costs was the geopolitical and economic autonomy of the countries of the Americas in prioritizing their own development.

That led to a long series of coups d’état and military invasions.^[15] From 1975 to 1981, the United States orchestrated a covert campaign of terror, torture, disappearances, and assassinations – “Operation Condor” – coordinating intelligence and training across eight South American countries against every democratic, labor, or dissident movement opposing the pro-U.S. military dictatorships of the time (Lessa, 2025). Cuba, apart from suffering the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the iron economic blockade imposed since 1962 to this day, continued to suffer a relentless campaign of terrorist actions for decades (Ferrer, 2022). In Mexico, it is well documented that the 1968 pro-democracy student movement was brutally repressed in coordination with the CIA (Bartley and Bartley, 2015).

III.3. The Return of U.S. Interventionism under the Donroe Doctrine. The end of the Cold War led the United States to make a strategic pivot toward the Eastern Hemisphere and to virtually abandon the Western one altogether. It focused on NATO’s eastward expansion in Europe, on competing with China in the Pacific Basin, on invading countries and toppling regimes in Central Asia (Afghanistan and Iraq), and in Western Asia (the Middle East) and North Africa after the 2011 “Arab Spring.” Latin America, which seized the opportunity, experienced a “pink tide” of democratically elected progressive and anti-imperialist governments during this period – a phenomenon that, unusually, was neither attacked nor even taken into account by U.S. administrations, from Bill Clinton through Barack Obama.^[16] Diplomatic relations with Cuba were even restored by the latter in 2015.

But since Trump returned to the White House for the second time, proclaiming the “Trump Corollary” in December of last year, the United States made a strategic reversal: it opted to neglect the Eastern Hemisphere and focus on the Western one instead (with the exception, as already mentioned, of its two wars with Iran and its support for the genocide in Gaza).

Less than a month after issuing its new doctrine, the U.S. carried out an unprecedented lightning military operation on January 2 in Venezuela, resulting in the capture and abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and the decapitation of the Chavista regime – though leaving it nominally in power in exchange for seizing control of the country’s mineral and oil resources (Venezuela holds the largest reserves in the world), under threat of further invasions. In this way the Trump 2.0 regime has turned Venezuela, to this day, into a protectorate and an abject colony of exploitation.

As early as September 2025, the Trump 2.0 regime began bombing vessels in the Caribbean, and later in the Pacific, in flagrant violation of all international law, as part of a supposedly anti-drug military campaign called Operation Southern Spear. To date, this campaign has killed more than 210 civilians with impunity, most of them fishermen of multiple nationalities from the Caribbean and South America. It has also seized oil tankers on the high seas under the unilateral and illegal sanctions it imposed on Venezuela and Cuba, stealing their cargo. This scale of piracy (which to date amounts to $8 billion) had not been seen in the hemisphere since colonial times.

In late January of this year, it successfully pressured Panama into voiding the contracts of the Chinese port companies operating on both sides of the canal. It also arranged with the president of El Salvador to use his inhumane high-security prisons to receive hundreds of deportees from the United States – most of whom have turned out to have no criminal record.

Trump repeatedly threatened to do to Colombian president Gustavo Petro what he did to Maduro and intervened in Colombia’s presidential elections by openly backing a far-right candidate, who won this past June. He also brazenly intervened in the presidential elections in Chile and Honduras, and in the midterm elections in Argentina, with similar results. In fact, most of the major Latin American countries – except for Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba – have already been “Trumpified” in this way, through Trump’s active electoral interference and in the face of the powerlessness of left and center-left parties.

In Mexico, the Trump 2.0 regime has relentlessly pressured Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, just as Trump 1.0 did with AMLO. She has gradually given ground to the incessant torrent of onerous demands that Trump and his team present to her government in those constant “high-level meetings” on migration, security, and economic penetration – ostensibly under the principles that Sheinbaum always repeats and that Trump never mentions: “respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, shared and differentiated responsibility, mutual respect and trust, and cooperation without subordination.” It is all a fragile, tottering kabuki theater kept up on the Mexican side, and a constant barrage of threats and offenses on the American side.

Faced with incessant threats of high tariffs and military intervention in Mexico, the Sheinbaum government (like the AMLO government before it) has followed a strategy of “feeding the tiger while avoiding its claws at all costs.” Diplomatic forms are scrupulously maintained; a willingness to dialogue and cooperate, framed within nationalist rhetoric, is invariably displayed, always with a dignified, serene, and prudent posture; and, to strengthen her standing with her base and demonstrate to Trump her determination to “defend national sovereignty,” the beleaguered president makes a point of periodically rallying and reaffirming popular support, which is indisputably still very broad (hovering around 68%).

But, little by little, she has had to keep yielding on matters of substance.^[17] It is worth quoting the Mexican analyst Viridiana Ríos (2025) in her article, “What Trump Really Wants from Mexico,” to understand the extent to which the Trump administration seeks to dominate Mexico. After reviewing the list of demands that the Trump administration persistently makes of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government in all those closed-door bilateral meetings, Ríos concludes:

“Trump does not want Mexico to be his trading partner. He wants Mexico to be a cheap producer, submissive and colonized by American companies enjoying regulatory and structural advantages. Nor does he want a Mexico capable of implementing industrial policies that benefit Mexican companies. On the list of demands from the United States to Mexico, only a handful touch on matters that are genuinely bilateral or mutually beneficial. Most are demands aimed at getting Mexico to modify its regulatory framework in favor of American companies, or to clear the way for them to dominate our market and weaken national competitiveness. The central demand is Mexico’s total alignment with the economic interests of the United States.”

Having failed to achieve all these objectives, the Trump administration declared in July of this year that it will not renew the USMCA – the trade treaty between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada – retaining it for the next 10 years but effectively condemning it to death by subjecting it to onerous annual renegotiations – which sabotages the very purpose of the treaty. The relentless pressure continues. Trump 2.0 seeks the capitulation of the Mexican government and the complete, subordinate incorporation of the Mexican economy into the American one, turning its principal trading partner into just one more vassal state.

Meanwhile, CIA penetration in Mexico has already been exposed in several episodes, deeply embarrassing to the president. The threats of tariffs and/or military intervention continue unabated.

Cuba is the other principal target of imperial fury thus far; since late January of this year it has been subjected to a fierce fuel blockade – fuel previously imported from Venezuela, Mexico, and other countries – under threat of punitive tariffs. Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, have thus unleashed a renewed campaign of aggression seeking regime change against the Castro government through the total suffocation of its economy, aiming to provoke a popular uprising and/or clear the way for military intervention. After the decapitation and subjugation of the Venezuelan regime, only the disastrous, bogged-down  military adventure that Trump and his ally Netanyahu launched against Iran in late February – which has led to a military quagmire and a first-order geopolitical defeat – has kept the empire from turning against Cuba with its full fury. What will happen once that war concludes, in whatever time remains to the Trump 2.0 regime, if it goes at all?

IV.           The Options of the Peoples, Migrant Diasporas, and Governments of the Western Hemisphere in the Face of the Trump 2.0 Regime’s Onslaught

The first thing to highlight is just how few resources and how little economic power the Trump 2.0 regime actually has for its new imperialist offensive in the Western Hemisphere, beyond the president’s blustering rhetoric and his relentless military and tariff threats – the latter of which have proven counterproductive and have been struck down by the courts or withdrawn by Trump himself.

One should ask why there was no massive invasion and prolonged occupation of Venezuela, of the kind George W. Bush launched in Central Asia at the start of the century. The underlying reason is that the United States has long stayed afloat only thanks to its ability to sustain, unlike the rest of the world, an enormous national debt without immediate consequences – a debt that today reaches $39.67 trillion.^[18]

This severe macroeconomic constraint is the result of its loss of global economic hegemony, of ceasing to be the world’s center of capitalist accumulation, and of squandering trillions of dollars on disastrous wars and unproductive arms buildups in an attempt to reverse that decline. And the worst part is that none of its wars this century has paid off.

The United States no longer has – as it did decades ago under the Reagan and both Bush administrations – either the resources or the popular support to go around invading anyone (the recent war against Iran has been the most unpopular in the country’s entire history). Nor does it have the means to invest in successfully competing with the rival economic powers of East Asia and the European Union. It even lacks the Treasury Department resources to finance the repair of the Venezuelan oil industry’s infrastructure that it has seized (Karma, 2026). The U.S. is in outright fiscal bankruptcy, though a concealed one.^[19]

The Trump 2.0 regime bet that, simply by carrying out a spectacular, fleeting, but relatively cheap attack ($4.7 billion) against Nicolás Maduro, the rest of the regime would collapse without resistance and submit to its imperial dictates. And, as luck would have it, that is what happened. But quite another matter is the Venezuelan people who, although they have not reacted yet (half a year into the intervention), are seeing no benefit whatsoever from the ongoing plunder of their country’s oil and mineral wealth, nor any democratic transition, nor the restoration of their sovereignty, nor even U.S. assistance for the severe humanitarian catastrophe suffered after the earthquakes of June 24 of this year. Nothing could be further from reality than to anticipate that Venezuelans (aside from their revanchist elites and the anti-Chavista diaspora in Florida) will resign themselves to remaining a subjugated Yankee protectorate for much longer. Hugo Chávez’s anti-imperialist legacy will see to it that this fantasy is dispatched by the new forms of resistance that will emerge.

Cuba is another matter entirely. It may be, in the eyes of the left, the most heroic of the peoples of “Our America” – as Latin Americans refer to themselves –  since the middle of the last century, or, in the eyes of the right, the worst dictatorship on the continent, but everyone agrees that Cuba and its people have not surrendered to the imperial onslaughts of their powerful neighbor; not throughout the lengthy Cold War period, or during the unipolar “Special Period” of hardships that followed, or during the new challenges that arose in this multipolar century, including the rise of MAGA-Trumpism in the United States. Its government will not surrender as easily as Venezuela’s did. Neither attempts at economic strangulation nor threats of invasion will bend it to the breaking point. The Cuban people, though, under the circumstances desperately need global solidarity to survive. Given all the humanitarian solidarity aid Cuba has given the entire world, it deserves that solidarity today more than anyone.

Although the Cuban American diaspora in Florida and its representatives continue to support the cruel Yankee aggressions against Cuba, the other Latin American diasporas, out of basic solidarity and sense of responsibility living in the “belly of the monster,” must do everything possible to defend Cuba and demand non-intervention and an end to the blockades. The U.S. and Cuba can reconcile, but not under the gun nor under a boot.

Cuba’s internal problems, of which there are many, and the deep contradictions of its socialist project may well be serious, but only the Cubans who live on the island should confront and resolve them, and no one else. In the exercise of their right to self-determination and national sovereignty, they should and can build bridges of reconciliation with the diaspora, but without ever accepting any imposition, either from the diaspora or from the powerful imperialist country where it resides.

As for Mexico, the country most exposed to U.S. interventionism and blackmail because of its long shared border and its extensive but asymmetrical economic integration with the U.S., how much longer will it keep feeding the tiger, trying to avoid Trump’s claws, before being devoured?

Two assets the center-left Morena government has, for putting an end to further concessions and defending itself more effectively against Trumpist onslaughts, are: (a) the enormous popular support in Mexico for a genuinely anti-imperialist agenda, were the Fourth Transformation (4T) government to activate it beyond sovereigntist rhetoric and puerile diplomatic niceties, were it to change course in its development strategy, and were it to more seriously pursue firm new international alliances in this multipolar world; and (b) the enormous Mexican diaspora in the U.S. (40 million – 68 million if we add the other Latino diasporas), historically neglected and now abandoned in the face of MAGA-Trumpist persecution, which could be backed far more firmly than it has been so far in its struggles against this racist and xenophobic project. Given the incessant attacks on Mexico as well as its diaspora, the political will would have to be found to unify the struggles on both sides of the border, something none of the Fourth Transformation governments has attempted so far. But soon, under the Donroe Doctrine, it could find itself forced to try.

In other scenarios, it has been very encouraging to see the immediate, forceful, and unified rejection of the threats to invade and the attempts to “buy” Greenland under the Donroe Doctrine. Likewise, regarding the annexationist and tariff threats against Canada, the world gave a standing ovation to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this past January, for his courageous declaration that the Pax Americana has ended and that Canada will now actively seek other trading and geopolitical partners besides the United States (see Stevis-Gridneff and Austen, 2026). On January 16 of this year, China and Canada sealed an agreement to mutually reduce tariffs between them.

As for the “Trumpist tide” of far-right elected governments now afflicting the democracies of the American continent, including foremost that of the United States, it must be understood that although it may have extended, through its threats, interventions, and false promises, to a majority of the hemispheric population and a plurality of countries – enjoying its high tide, so to speak – the undertow will come sooner rather than later, when populations plundered by capitalist elites and disillusioned by the lack of results rise up again to resist and mobilize for a new and more powerful, continent wide pink tide.

The United States has already had two pink tides of its own in the 20th century: the first in the 1930s, when it won workers’ labor rights, and the second in the 1960s, when it won the social rights of subaltern groups. Today both gains have been severely undermined. The next U.S. pink tide will face the task of restructuring and revitalizing its rigged and unresponsive political and economic systems, beginning with modernizing its anachronistic Constitution by making its unbalanced federal structure equitable, dismantling its elitist and undemocratic duopoly and establishing a more open and democratic political system, and curtailing and redistributing the enormous concentration of wealth of its plutocracy. It will also necessarily have to extend citizenship, with all the rights that come with it, to the delegalized and persecuted migrant diasporas residing in the country, and, in a reversal of the past half century of unremitting restrictionism, adopting, by design, a far more agile, humane, and regionally established migration regime, suited to fulfilling a new vision of building a more just, balanced, and harmonious continental integration. That requires forging the political will to organize, accumulate and deploy people power, as in all previous eras of great transformation. It can and must be done.

It is for all these reasons that, as a general strategy, far from it being prudent or advisable for the movements, governments, and social sectors affected by MAGA-Trumpism – including the U.S. people and its migrant diasporas and ethnic groups – to adopt, at this juncture, a myopic strategy of “every man for himself” or “dodging the claw” by acting on their own and yielding to the demands of the empire, its authoritarian state and its ruthless oligarchies, which will not cease. What is needed instead is to mobilize and unite around a universal resistance to this neo-imperialist and neo-fascist turn, forging firm and unequivocal solidarity among all subaltern classes and groups.

At the interstate level, it is urgent to reactivate CELAC to fight together and build a new and better model of continental integration than the models imported from the U.S., whether neoliberal or neocolonial. The valuable positive experiences achieved during the previous “pink tide” period from 2000 to 2015 must be rescued, and the negative lessons it left behind must be absorbed and overcome. Latin America must go out into the world united and forge great new alliances in this multipolar world, both with the powers of East Asia and the European Union, and with the Arab world and all other vital regions of the Global South. Separately, each country will find this very difficult to accomplish, but united it will be far more feasible.

Finally, reciprocal solidarity is required among the U.S. American people themselves, who are also under attack as we have seen, and between them and the Latin American peoples; and very particularly between the immigrant and Latino ethnic communities in the U.S. and their countries of origin. The United States has always influenced the entire continent, for better and for worse, since its founding. Today, the continent is present within the U.S., though politically scattered and deactivated. The time has come for the Latino diasporas and ethnic communities to unite, mobilize, and decisively influence the course of this powerful country toward a more promising future for the country and the hemisphere.^[20]

Activating these levels of solidarity requires continuous, up-to-date transnational and intersectional coordination. If this was once logistically impossible and powerful structures of national politics and economics kept us compartmentalized, today the only remaining obstacle is a lack of political will and imagination: with digital technology, the new movements and their social networks not only make it possible but generate and spread transnationally coordinated action and mutual solidarity with great speed, rising above all censorship by the repressive state – just as the Dreamers have already done in their transnational journey and vision, crossing the mental and geographic borders of the continent.

In conclusion: Antonio Gramsci wrote from prison in the 1930s that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; and in this chiaroscuro monsters emerge” (Gramsci, 2018). In these times of systemic crisis of historical capitalism, even more acute than a century ago, new varieties of fascism, racism, and nationalism have arisen around the world, both in the Global North and the Global South. At the head of them all stands the American MAGA-Trumpist project, which seized power over the world’s most powerful state in 2016, and again in 2025. But despite the chaos and destruction it is causing, this is also the moment in which the once-solid structures and once-dominant elites are losing their legitimacy, their solidity and coherence, and are clashing and collapsing as their power fades. And it is precisely in this turbulent era that spaces open up for all subaltern, marginalized, and oppressed social actors to rebel, act, and change the world into a more promising, equitable, just, free, and sustainable one.

This is the moment we are living through, and this is the challenge we all face today.

V. Bibliography

American Immigration Council, 2026. “Immigrants in the United States”. Web link: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/immigrants-in-the-united-states/.

Arrighi, Giovanni, Beverly Silver, et al., 1999. Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN: 978-0816631520.

Arrighi, Giovanni, 2005a. “Hegemony Unravelling – I”. New Left Review, No. 32, March-April 2005.

__________, 2005b. “Hegemony Unravelling – II”. New Left Review, No. 33, May-June 2005.

__________, 2009. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century. London. Verso Books. ISBN: 978-1844672981.

Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence Hopkins, Immanuel Wallerstein, 2012. Anti-Systemic Movements.

Bacon, David, 2009. Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Beacon Press. ISBN: 978-0807042304.

Bartley, Russell, Sylvia Bartley, 2015. Eclipse of the Assassins: The CIA, Imperial Politics, and the Slaying of Mexican Journalist Manuel Buendía. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN: 978-0299306403.

Cancian, María, et al., 2026. “The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?”. Brookings Institution. Web link: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-administration-has-detained-400000-immigrants-what-do-we-know-about-their-children/.

Conley, Julia, 2025. “New Report Exposes Torture, Abuse, and Medical Neglect in Florida Migrant Jails”. Truthout, December 4, 2025. Web link: https://truthout.org/articles/new-report-exposes-torture-abuse-and-medical-neglect-in-florida-migrant-jails/.

Dolinar, Brian, 2026. “ICE Wants to Buy Warehouses for Mass Detention. Communities Are Fighting Back.” Truthout, February 28, 2026. Web link: https://truthout.org/articles/ice-wants-to-buy-warehouses-for-mass-detention-communities-are-fighting-back/.

Ferguson, Niall, 2026. “From Maduro’s capture to the AI race, we’re back to the future”, The London Times, January 10, 2026.

Ferrer, Ada, 2022. Cuba: An American History. New York: Scribner. ISBN: 978-1501154560.

FWD.US, 2026. “DACA Delays, Denials, Detentions, & Deportations”, Issue Brief. Web link: https://www.fwd.us/news/daca-delays-denials-detentions-deportations/.

Gedeon, Joseph, 2026. “The full list of 75 countries where Trump is suspending visa processing,” The Guardian, January 14, 2026.

Gramsci, Antonio, 2018 [1930s]. Pasado y presente: Cuadernos de la Cárcel. Editorial GEDISA. ISBN: 978-8417341121.

Grandin, Greg, 2025. America, América: A New History of the New World. New York. Penguin Press. ISBN: 978-0593831250.

Guerrero, Maurizio, 2024. “New Report Finds Nearly All Deaths in ICE Custody Over 5 Years Were Preventable”, Truthout, June 26, 2024. Web link: https://truthout.org/articles/new-report-finds-nearly-all-deaths-in-ice-custody-over-5-years-were-preventable/.

HIAS Staff, 2026. “Deep Dive: The Great Replacement Theory”. HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). May 7, 2026. Web link: https://hias.org/news/deep-dive-great-replacement-theory/.

Hiemstra, Nancy, Deirdre Conlon, 2025. Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants. Pluto Press. ISBN: 978-0745349466.

Hopkins, Terence & Immanuel Wallerstein, 1996. The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945-2025. Zed Books. ISBN: 978-1856494403.

Jacobin, 2025. “Borders. Deportations as Class Strategy”. Jacobin, No. 59, Fall 2025.

Karma, Rogé, 2026. “Big Oil Knows That Trump’s Venezuela Plans Are Delusional,” The Atlantic, Jan. 10, 2026.

Lessa, Francesca, 2025. “Operation Condor: the secret system that terrorised exiled South American dissidents 50 years ago”, The Conversation, November 25, 2025. Web link: https://theconversation.com/operation-condor-the-secret-system-that-terrorised-exiled-south-american-dissidents-50-years-ago-268139.

Ludwig, Mike, 2026. “ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.” Truthout, June 23, 2026. Web link: https://truthout.org/articles/ice-says-51-people-died-in-custody-under-trump-experts-say-thats-an-undercount/.

Lytle Hernandez, Kelly, 2010. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. University of California Press. ISBN: 978-0520266414.

Ness, Immanuel, 2023. Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries. Polity. ISBN: 978-1509553990.

New York Times, 2026. “E.U. and South America to Form Free-Trade Zone With 700 Million People”, The New York Times, January 6, 2026.

NPR, 2026. “U.S. to exit 66 international organizations in further retreat from global cooperation”. January 7, 2026. Web link: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/07/g-s1-104999/united-states-exits-international-organizations-united-nations.

Ossoff, Jon, 2026. “Over 1,000 Credible Reports Of Human Rights Abuses In U.S. Immigration Detention”. United States Senate. Web link: https://www.ossoff.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/260114_Report_Patterns_v5.pdf.

Reed, Brad, 2025. “Report Says Florida Immigration Prisons Are Violating Human Rights Standards”. Truthout, July 21, 2025. Web link: https://truthout.org/articles/report-says-florida-immigration-prisons-are-violating-human-rights-standards/.

Ríos, Viridiana, 2025. “Lo que realmente quiere Trump de México” [“What Trump Really Wants from Mexico”]. El País (Spain), October 30, 2025. Web link: https://elpais.com/mexico/opinion/2025-10-30/lo-que-realmente-quiere-trump-de-mexico.html.

Robinson, William, 2025. Epochal Crisis. London. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-1009670494.

Santos, Gonzalo, 2018. “Lo que méxico y su diáspora enfrentarán en el próximo sexenio: 3 tesis” [“What Mexico and Its Diaspora Will Face in the Next Six-Year Term: 3 Theses”]. Web link: https://www.gonzalo-santos.com/post/lo-que-m%C3%A9xico-y-su-di%C3%A1spora-enfrentar%C3%A1n-en-el-pr%C3%B3ximo-sexenio-3-tesis.

__________, 2022. “El mundo y Norteamérica en el 2022: la libramos en aguas turbulentas” [“The World and North America in 2022: We Weathered Turbulent Waters”]. Web link: https://www.csub.edu/~gsantos/ElmundoyNorteamerica2022.pdf.

__________, 2024a. “The World’s Chaos is ‘Coming Home to Roost’ - The Broader Meaning of the Campus Antiwar Protests”. Web link: https://www.gonzalo-santos.com/post/the-world-s-chaos-is-coming-home-to-roost-the-broader-meaning-of-the-campus-antiwar-protests.

__________, 2024b. “The Crisis of American Democracy and the Rise of the MAGA Neo-fascist Project”. Web link: https://www.gonzalo-santos.com/post/the-crisis-of-american-democracy-and-the-rise-of-the-maga-neofascist-project.

__________, 2024c. “Mexicanidad, latinidad, y la lucha por el futuro de la América Septentrional” [“Mexicanness, Latinidad, and the Struggle for the Future of Northern America”], in Alfredo Sánchez Castañeda, Armando Vázquez-Ramos, Daniel Márquez (Eds.), 2024. La identidad de los mexicanos en el extranjero: Una mirada desde diversas perspectivas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Estudios Mexicanos UNAM-Los Angeles. Web link: https://www.gonzalo-santos.com/es/_files/ugd/a04c42_8aedf29ea56c4a35997132216c7e1fc0.pdf.

__________, 2025. “The Limits of Liberalism & The Rise of Maga Fascism”. Web link: https://www.gonzalo-santos.com/post/the-limits-of-liberalism-the-rise-of-maga-fascism.

Shah, Silky, 2024. Unbuild Walls. Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Haymarket Books. ISBN: 979-8888900840.

SIFMA, 2026. “US Treasury Securities Statistics”. Report of July 6, 2026. Web link: https://www.sifma.org/research/statistics/us-treasury-securities-statistics.

Stevis-Gridneff, Matina & Ian Austen, 2026. “Canada Flexes on Global Stage With an Eye to Its Own Survival” The New York Times, January 20, 2026.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1998. Utopistics: Or Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century. The New Press. ISBN: 978-1565844575.

__________, 2023. The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World. The New Press. ISBN: 978-1565847996.

White House, 2022. “National Security Strategy”. Web link: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf.

__________, 2025. “National Security Strategy of the United States”. Web link: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf.

Zolberg, Aristide, 2006. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Harvard University Press. ISBN: 978-0674022188.

^[1] Professor Emeritus of Sociology, California State University, Bakersfield. Ph.D. in Sociology from Binghamton University, New York. Vice President of the California-Mexico Studies Center, Long Beach, California. Email: gsantos@csub.edu. Website: https://www.gonzalo-santos.com/.

^[3] To analyze the systemic chaos the world is living through and its ever-growing impact on the United States, its neighboring countries, and their migrant diasporas, see Santos, 2018; Santos, 2022; Santos, 2024a; Santos, 2024b; and Santos, 2025. To understand the general link between irregular international migration and the neoliberal policies of the globalization era, see Ness (2023); for the specific case of Mexico, Bacon (2009).

^[4] In particular, it is urgent to address, theoretically and historically, the significance of the spectacular rise of China and East Asia in general, especially its hybrid character – straddling Marxism-Leninism, on one hand, and a capitalism “with Chinese characteristics” (or Japanese or Korean characteristics), on the other; the emergence of the inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine and the resurgence of fascist movements and parties in Europe; the genocide in Gaza amid the powerlessness of the Arab world and the complicity of the Global North; and the current war between the U.S. and Israel against Iran. It is also urgent to address the geopolitical and geocultural crisis in all international governance institutions. This essay analyzes only the evolution of the current chaos in the Americas.

^[5] MAGA is the acronym given to the movement and ideology that has been supporting Donald Trump since 2015 to this day, which stands for Make America Great Again.

^[6] For an alternative analysis explaining the current behavior of the U.S., from a conservative perspective, as the welcome return to the American geopolitical dynamic of Theodore Roosevelt 120 years ago, in contrast to the German dynamic of Hitler 90 years ago, see Ferguson (2026). Indeed, one could argue that what we are witnessing today is an anachronistic combination of both behaviors on the part of Donald Trump in this era of systemic transition.

^[7] Economic competition beyond China has also emerged. The European Union has just concluded a broad trade pact with four South American countries – Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay – creating one of the largest free-trade zones in the world, connecting markets of more than 700 million people (New York Times, 2026).

^[8] For this section, focused on the pivotal issue of migration in the age of MAGA-Trumpism, we draw on information from the following sources: Nancy Hiemstra & Deirdre Conlon (2025); Jacobin (2025); Lytle Hernandez (2010); Gedeon (2026); FWD.US (2026); Cancian, et al. (2026); Ludwig (2026); American Immigration Council (2026); Ossoff (2026); Reed (2025); Conley (2025); Guerrero (2024); and Dolinar (2026). To understand the vital importance and the ceaseless, fierce political struggle over migration in the construction and design of the U.S. at every stage of its history, see Zolberg (2006).

^[9] The IRCA law, passed in 1986 during Reagan’s second term, granted amnesty to 2.7 million undocumented migrants in exchange for increasing the budget of immigration agencies, militarizing the border, and criminalizing the employment of undocumented workers. It created the burdensome H-2A guest agricultural worker program without expanding permanent legal migration. Congress passed and Clinton signed two laws in 1996, IIRIRA and AEDPA, which criminalized LPRs and undocumented immigrants further, and authorized the detention and deportation machinery that subsequent administrations, from George W. Bush onward, with bipartisan congressional support, expanded relentlessly, implementing ever more restrictive and punitive policies, up to today’s vast gulag archipelago. See Shah (2024).

^[10] On January 7, 2026, President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum ordering the United States to withdraw from 66 international organizations – 31 entities affiliated with the United Nations and 35 non-UN organizations. Among the notable organizations and treaties from which the United States is withdrawing are:

•                    Climate and environment: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (the 1992 founding treaty for the Paris Agreement), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Solar Alliance, and the International Tropical Timber Organization.

•                    Human rights and social policy: UN Women, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the Office of the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

•                    Development and governance: UNCTAD (the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), the United Nations Democracy Fund, and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA).

•                    Security and cooperation: The Global Counterterrorism Forum, the Atlantic Cooperation Partnership, and the Venice Commission. (See NPR, 2026.)

^[11] It is worth comparing this new strategy with the previous one under the Joe Biden administration (White House, 2022), which emphasized as its top priority the geoeconomic war with China, but also the geopolitical containment of Russia and Iran based on NATO and UN and OAS multilateralism.

^[12] China’s response will not be military for now, but economic, political, and diplomatic. China does not need weapons – although it has them – to respond to U.S. imperialism, as it has shown in the recent negotiations over rare earths, where it demonstrated its ability to bring the U.S. to heel without resorting to them. But the onset of a new escalation of geopolitical rivalries between the two largest powers is destabilizing, and generating greater chaos within, the world-system.

^[13] We rely primarily on the book America, América by Greg Grandin (2025).

^[14] Among them, the 1903 intervention to separate the province of Panama from Colombia, build the famous canal, take control of the canal and its zone for a hundred years, and send in the Marines from 1918 to 1920 and again in 1925; it turned Cuba into its protectorate under the Platt Amendment (1901) and militarily intervened there repeatedly from 1917 to 1933, besides seizing Guantánamo Bay as a military base “in perpetuity”; it occupied Nicaragua for 33 years (1912-1933), Haiti for 19 years (1915-1934), the Dominican Republic for 8 years (1916-1924), intermittently occupied Honduras between 1903 and 1925, and Guatemala in 1920. In Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution, the U.S. orchestrated the coup and assassination of President Francisco I. Madero and installed the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta; it occupied the port of Veracruz in 1914 and later sent the Punitive Expedition in 1916 to capture Pancho Villa.

^[15] Guatemala and Paraguay (1954), Haiti (1957), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Bolivia (countless times), Cuba (1961), Chile and Uruguay (1973), Argentina (1976), the counterinsurgency wars in Central America in the 1970s and 80s, Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Honduras (2008), and Venezuela (2002 and 2019).

^[16] Mexico, which against the regional trend elected center-right governments until 2018, chose to integrate with the United States, formalized through NAFTA in 1994 and the Mérida Initiative in 2008. Something similar happened with Colombia until 2022. Most of the United States’ attention turned toward these two countries.

^[17] Mexico, for instance, has already deployed 10,000 troops on its northern border to intercept migrants (previously, AMLO did the same on the southern border with 25,000 National Guard troops), has accepted more than 203,000 deported Mexicans during Trump’s second term through April of this year – 164,000 people through the land border and 39,000 by air to southern Mexico; it has also received more than 17,000 additional deportees from third countries, and has expelled or blocked tens of thousands more from transiting through its own territory; it has handed over, through extralegal channels, a total of 92 drug traffickers and criminal operators to the United States; and it has imposed tariffs of up to 50% on various imports from China and other Asian countries; all of this in compliance with Washington’s draconian directives under the “Donroe Doctrine,” and in exchange for nothing.

^[18] The United States can accumulate a massive national debt without any immediate impact because the U.S. dollar is the world’s principal reserve currency and the global economy depends on U.S. Treasury securities as the safest guarantee available. The value of those securities amounts to $30.9 trillion (SIFMA, 2026).

^[19] This, incidentally, also explains why in its air war with Iran this year it has not invaded that country, which to date has “only” cost the U.S. taxpayers a few hundred billion dollars, besides the tens of billions they’ve had to pay as consumers for higher oil and consumer goods prices, instead of the more than $5 trillion estimated to have been spent by Bush II, Obama, Trump 1.0, and Biden in their failed ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

^[20] For a thorough analysis of the strategic role played by the Mexican and Latin American diasporas in envisioning and building a renewed, better-integrated, balanced, rational, and just North America, with a much more inclusive and advanced social contract than the one seen in the previous asymmetrical, socially unjust, and politically chaotic neoliberal integration process – now in full chaotic disintegration under the onslaught of MAGA-Trumpism – see Santos (2024c).