[News] US Imperialism Lashes Out - A Wounded Tiger is Still A Tiger

Sun Aug 30 14:37:24 EDT 2026

US Imperialism Lashes Out
A Wounded Tiger is Still A Tiger: My People’s Democracy column
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  US Imperialism Lashes Out
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      A Wounded Tiger is Still A Tiger: My People’s Democracy column

Vijay Prashad <https://substack.com/@luciddialectics>

Aug 30, 2026

<https://substack.com/@luciddialectics>

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Every week I write an article in People’s Democracy (India). This week, 
I wrote 
<https://substack.com/redirect/b7afb74f-0d03-4398-8357-a8350b7f6b84?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>on 
the shenanigans of US imperialism. You might ask, why this painting by a 
Sri Lankan artist from the ‘43 Group. I have always found Ivan Peries’ 
work to be a wonderful example of the struggles of the Third World 
imaginary to emerge. And here, in 1978, he seems to be painting a woman 
looking at the waters, wondering when a new world will be formed; or 
perhaps she watches a US warship enter Sri Lankan waters to discipline 
the country for hosting the 5th Non-Aligned Summit in 1976, fifty years 
later assessed 
<https://substack.com/redirect/3bbe582d-1ccc-46ae-9a39-1a3b6c881c20?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>by 
my colleague from Tricontinental 
<https://substack.com/redirect/33a87b1b-d818-4c2f-9fee-16d5430db58d?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>Shiran 
Illanperuma at LeftViews.

	<https://substack.com/redirect/4ffcc0a5-db16-4a34-a69a-6250e7adefe7?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM> 	

*Ivan Peries (Sri Lanka), Dehiwala, 1978*

The war against Iran must not be understood as an isolated eruption of 
aggression by US hyper-imperialism. Nor can it be explained merely by 
the obsessions of Donald Trump, the expansionist ambitions of Israel, or 
the influence of the most reactionary sections of the US ruling class. 
The war belongs to a much wider crisis. The United States is lashing out 
because the foundations of its power are weakening, while its ruling 
class has neither the political imagination nor the social capacity to 
repair them.

The US is not powerless. It remains the world’s most dangerous military 
power with nine hundred foreign military bases and nearly two-thirds of 
global annual military spending and controls many of the institutions of 
international finance in a Wall Street-Dollar complex. A wounded tiger 
is still a tiger. But Washington is increasingly unable to convert its 
military, financial, and diplomatic advantages into stable political 
outcomes. It can destroy countries, but it cannot easily reconstruct its 
own productive economy or build an international order that commands 
consent. The violence against Iran is therefore an expression not of 
confidence, but of frustration.

*SOURCES OF FRUSTRATION*

The first source of this frustration is the /long decline of US 
industrial capacity/. During the neoliberal decades, the country’s 
ruling class transferred factories abroad, attacked organised labour, 
and transformed productive investment into financial speculation. Entire 
industrial regions were hollowed out and made into factory deserts so 
that corporations could take advantage of cheaper labour elsewhere, 
while Wall Street captured a growing share of the resulting profits. It 
is not that the US has ceased to manufacture things, since real 
manufacturing output has risen over the past fifty years due to, amongst 
other factors, productivity gains. But there has been a profound erosion 
of industrial depth, with fewer workers (from 25% of non-farm employment 
in 1970 to 8% today) in manufacturing, a small share of global 
manufacturing, weakened supply chains, lost productive ecosystems, 
persistent trade deficits, and dependence on foreign capacity in 
strategically vital industries.

The United States remains a major manufacturer, particularly in 
aerospace, armaments, pharmaceuticals, and several advanced 
technologies. But the direction of change is unmistakable. According to 
UNIDO, China produced 32 per cent of global manufacturing value added in 
2024, compared with 15 per cent for the US. Northern America ran a 
substantial deficit in manufactured goods, while China consolidated its 
position as the world’s largest manufacturing economy. In December 2025, 
US manufacturing capacity utilisation stood at only 75.6 per cent, below 
its long-term average.

Washington can impose tariffs, provide subsidies, and demand that 
companies return production home. But industrialisation is not a switch 
that a president can turn on. It requires trained workers, public 
infrastructure, long-term investment, technological depth, and a state 
capable of planning. The financialised US economy has spent decades 
dismantling these capacities. Its ruling class wants the benefits of 
industrial strength without challenging the power of finance or raising 
the social wage of the working class.

The second source of anxiety is the /dollar-Wall Street system/. The 
dollar remains the principal reserve currency, accounting for nearly 57 
per cent of allocated official foreign exchange reserves in late 2025. 
Dollar-denominated banking, debt, trade invoicing, and offshore dollar 
markets – the vast Eurodollar system – still give the US enormous 
structural power. Because banks and companies outside the US need 
dollars, Washington can use access to its financial system as a 
political weapon. But this weapon has been overused. The seizure of 
sovereign assets, unilateral sanctions, exclusion from dollar-clearing 
systems, and the threat of secondary sanctions have shown every 
government that its reserves and commercial transactions are safe only 
as long as Washington permits them to be safe. The freezing of Russian 
assets was particularly instructive. It announced that property rights, 
supposedly sacred to the capitalist order, could be suspended when 
required by US strategy.

No other currency has yet displaced the dollar, and the decline in its 
reserve share has been gradual. But the search for alternatives is real. 
Bilateral settlement in national currencies, regional payment systems, 
central-bank digital arrangements, and increased purchases of gold are 
not declarations of a new financial order. They are insurance policies 
against US coercion. The dollar system is not collapsing, but the 
confidence on which it depends is being steadily corroded by Washington 
itself.

The third problem is /Europe/. Since 1945, the US has treated Western 
Europe as the eastern flank of its own power. NATO institutionalised 
European military subordination, while the dollar system and US 
corporations narrowed the continent’s economic sovereignty. The war in 
Ukraine deepened this dependence as Europe cut itself away from 
relatively cheap Russian energy, expanded purchases of US energy, and 
increased military spending largely through weapons systems tied to US 
production and command structures.

The 2025 European Union–United States trade arrangement exposed the 
quality of this relationship. Europe accepted tariffs, promised enormous 
purchases of US energy, and pledged substantial investment in the US. 
European leaders presented submission as negotiation and their ruling 
classes have accepted slower growth, industrial strain, and greater 
energy insecurity to remain within Washington’s strategic enclosure.

Yet a satrap remains useful only while it is economically and 
politically stable. Europe’s stagnation, fiscal pressures, fractured 
political systems, and growing popular discontent weaken its usefulness 
to the US. Washington has tightened the yoke, but it is pulling along a 
continent whose productive strength is being damaged partly by that very 
yoke.

The fourth source of US weakness lies in the /Gulf Arab world/. For 
decades, Washington offered monarchical security in exchange for oil 
priced in dollars, military facilities, arms purchases, and political 
compliance. This arrangement was never uncontested, but it formed a 
central pillar of US power. The war on Iran has shaken that pillar. It 
has demonstrated that US bases and weapons cannot guarantee the safety 
of Gulf infrastructure, shipping lanes, desalination facilities, or 
energy exports. The interruption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz 
and attacks on energy facilities have imposed enormous losses on the 
Gulf economies. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and 
Saudi Arabia have discovered that the US can initiate a war but cannot 
insulate its allies from the consequences.

Even Gulf rulers hostile to Iran must now calculate their security 
differently. Their economic plans require peace, investment, predictable 
shipping routes, and stable relations across Asia. China is their 
largest commercial partner, while India and other Asian economies are 
indispensable energy markets. They cannot indefinitely subordinate these 
material interests to a US-Israeli project of permanent war. Washington 
may still sell them weapons, but it can no longer promise them order. 
The war has turned US protection into a source of insecurity.

The fifth failure concerns /China/. For more than a decade, Washington 
has tried to slow China’s development through tariffs, sanctions, 
technology restrictions, military alliances, and naval pressure. The 
purpose is not merely to correct a trade imbalance, but it is to prevent 
China from moving upward through the most advanced sectors of 
production. Yet China’s manufacturing scale cannot be undone by a list 
of prohibited technologies. Its strength rests upon an integrated 
industrial system: infrastructure, scientific education, public finance, 
vast supply chains, and the capacity to coordinate investment. US 
restrictions have inflicted costs, but they have also accelerated 
China’s efforts to develop domestic technologies. Meanwhile, 
Washington’s tariff policies have unsettled its own companies, raised 
costs, and encouraged the reorganisation rather than the destruction of 
Asian supply chains.

The US can encircle China militarily, but it cannot bomb its way back to 
industrial primacy. Aircraft carriers do not produce machine tools, and 
sanctions do not educate engineers. The central contradiction of US 
strategy is that it is attempting to solve an economic and industrial 
problem through financial pressure and military encirclement. Slowly 
Japan and South Korea will learn the lessons being absorbed in the Gulf 
Arab states: US military bases are a target, not a shield, and – after 
the Mecca Agreement – perhaps the East Asian states need a regional 
security agreement and not imposed imperial security.

There is, however, one region where Washington has recently registered 
political gains: Latin America. The second progressive cycle has 
receded, and an Angry Tide has risen. The far right of a special type 
has advanced through elections, judicial warfare, media manipulation, 
capital strikes, and the exploitation of real public anxieties about 
crime, inflation, and institutional weakness. From Argentina and Ecuador 
to Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Colombia, reactionary governments have 
promised order while preparing privatisation, austerity, closer military 
cooperation with Washington and Tel Aviv, and renewed submission to 
international finance. This is a victory for the US, but it is an 
unstable one. The Angry Tide has no answer to the structural problems of 
the continent. It cannot overcome dependency, create sovereign 
industrial capacity, conduct meaningful land reform, or satisfy the 
needs of workers and peasants. Its programme is anger without 
emancipation: police violence for the poor, freedom for finance, and 
submission to Washington. If the social and political movements in the 
hemisphere organise themselves effectively, they will be able to turn 
the tide rapidly.

The war on Iran emerges from this total picture. The US cannot easily 
rebuild its industry, restore unquestioned authority to the dollar, 
stabilise Europe, guarantee the Gulf monarchies, or halt China’s 
advance. It therefore reaches for the instruments in which it retains an 
overwhelming advantage: bombs, sanctions, blockades, and threats. For 
that reason, Trump is the most adequate president for the US at this 
period. Dull liberalism cannot do this job. It requires the hatchet of 
ugly imperialism.

But violence cannot resolve the crisis that produces it; it can only 
distribute that crisis across the world. The danger is immense precisely 
because the US ruling class remains heavily armed while increasingly 
unable to achieve its objectives by other means. The task before the 
world’s peoples is not to celebrate imperialist decline as an automatic 
process, but it is to organise the political forces and build the 
historical bloc capable of preventing a desperate empire from setting 
the world on fire.

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© 2026 Vijay Prashad
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

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