It is impossible to understand the course being pursued by the current president, Donald Trump, or to determine its direction, before first understanding the reality of America today—the reality from which this administration proceeds in order to consolidate America’s international standing, magnify it, or halt its decline. Without this, any discussion of the administration’s orientation becomes a kind of hypothesis in which truth is mixed with fantasy or wishful thinking; in other words, it becomes a departure from understanding reality and a fall into errors of assessment. America is the empire of the age, without rival, and it possesses such vast capacities that some imagine to be unlimited. It is enough, by way of indication, that one of its richest men, Elon Musk, alone possesses wealth exceeding the gross domestic product of dozens of countries in the world; and that the Trump administration carried out a military operation lasting only a few hours in Venezuela, during which it arrested the country’s president, Maduro, and terrified those who came after him, until they immediately submitted to the US. Trump then announced his control over a country possessing the largest reserves of crude oil in the world, and began announcing, one after another, news of Venezuelan oil shipments feeding the American treasury. Accordingly, for politicians and states, underestimating or misjudging the pillars of power in the United States is a road to suicide—unless those politicians and states know very well how to assess the pillars of their own power and place what is sound among them, against what is diseased among the pillars of American power.

Every president who came to rule America added a new brick to its greatness—a greatness that continued to rise until it reached its summit with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, after which America began its path toward decline following its fall into the quagmire of Iraq. For the young America that emerged from the Second World War did so boasting of a great victory, the foremost emblem of which was its sole possession of the nuclear weapons, with which it settled the Japanese front, and its dollar as a global currency, not merely an American one, backed by two-thirds of the world’s gold, which had accumulated in America’s vaults after the war. Added to all of this was an economy of expanding production, untouched by the destruction of war, in a country of abundance and wealth that had gathered within it the elites of Europe. In other words, it was a state lacking none of the pillars of great-power strength—pillars that then continued to grow through the arms race led by America, which multiplied its power many times over, and through an economy upon which the rest of the world depended, especially its European allies. That dependence took the form of the Marshall Plan in Europe, through which the European economy was rebuilt in a manner that could not be separated from dependence upon America.

The only obstacle standing before the completion of the circle of American hegemony around the world was the Soviet Union. That obstacle collapsed completely in 1991, when the Soviet leader led his country and its camp in Eastern Europe toward a collapse that he attempted, and failed, to organize. America knew very well that this collapse had occurred under the force of American pressure through Reagan’s Star Wars program. With Eastern Europe breaking away from Moscow, the American president, George H. W. Bush, announced from Helsinki, the capital of Finland, after his meeting with Gorbachev in 1990, the birth of a new international order. He then launched his war against Iraq to expel it from Kuwait. After that, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the Soviet obstacle was removed from the path of American hegemony over the world. With Soviet Russia’s collapse and its fall from the position of the second state and the competitor to America, America became the leader of the world and its undisputed hegemon. It became the sole superpower. As for the other states below it, they were all great powers separated by vast distances from the pillars of American power, whether military, economic, or political.

America dominated the world and became its sole leader. It began building an international order that would reinforce the pillars of its power. With the collapse of socialism and the world’s loss of any ideological competitor to the capitalism led by America, the American philosopher Fukuyama spoke of the end of history—that is, the perpetuation of the American victory. Thus, the ideological struggle disappeared from the international arena. America made the nuclear disarmament agreements with Russia serve its own interests, while Russian military power withered, sank into the Chechen wars, and disappeared entirely from the international arena for more than two decades. America elevated the importance of the economy, the field in which it excelled, and inaugurated an era in which its major companies merged to become giant corporations beyond competition. It then unleashed them across the world to plunder wealth from it in a new age of globalization whose foundations America laid, beginning with the idea of free trade and the breaking of customs barriers. It established international appendaged tools for this order, among them the World Trade Organization in 1995. American policy aimed to perpetuate its hegemony and control over the world in accordance with Fukuyama’s theory.

During the more than three decades that preceded the Trump administration, American policy faced major international problems: its sinking into the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan; its war on Islam, which they called “terrorism”; the emergence of North Korea as a new nuclear power; the return of Russian demands for a multipolar international order, after Russia’s relative recovery and Putin’s assumption of leadership in Russia; Latin American countries slipping free from American influence; the shaking of American influence in the Arab region under the impact of the Arab Spring revolutions, especially in Syria, which consumed the efforts of Obama’s first administration and turned his hair grey; and, not least, the Russian war in Ukraine in 2022. As for the economy, the rise of China and the departure of American companies to it became a major dilemma for the American economy, surpassing in danger the economic competition with Europe—a competition for which the issuing of the euro in Europe became the symbol.

Throughout these three decades, America continued to oscillate between superiority and hegemony in every field on the international stage. Yet it began to incur enormous losses that dangerously exposed the limits of its power. America achieved many successes during these decades, the greatest of which was striking at the independence of European states and removing them from the path of effective international competition, until the Russian invasion of Ukraine exposed the states of Europe to a new reality: a deep military frailty that threatens their very existence should the American umbrella be lifted from them. This compelled them during the era of President Biden to end their independent policies toward China and return to order within the American wagon in exchange for America’s defense of them against Russia, which had begun gnawing at their eastern edge. America likewise removed the euro from competition with the dollar, turning it into a minor competitor, and tied the European states to American energy resources, especially gas, after the arteries of Russian energy to Europe were severed. Despite all of this, America, whose debt in 1990 stood at $3 trillion, has seen its debt grow dangerously today, approaching $40 trillion. Today, America faces the Chinese economy as the greatest threat to its economic greatness, and it strives with all its power to push it away from competition. Yet this Chinese economy has continued to grow significantly, and China has gone out into the world with its major investments, threatening American hegemony.

The Chinese dilemma drove America to wind down its war on Islam. It began withdrawing from Iraq, Afghanistan, and finally Syria, without having achieved any significant results. It invaded and occupied Afghanistan to wage war against al-Qaeda; it invaded Iraq in 2003 so that Iraq’s oil might contribute to reviving the American economy, only to be surprised by dozens of Islamic organizations fighting it in Iraq. Had Iran not assisted the US against the Iraqi revolution, America’s wings would have been broken in Iraq. Years passed during which America spent trillions of its dollars before it was able to exploit Iraq’s oil. In Afghanistan, it withdrew in 2021 in a humiliating withdrawal that returned the Taliban movement, which it had fought, to power. In Syria, where hundreds of Islamic organizations emerged raising the banner of the Khilafah, America found no solution except withdrawal and the installation of Ahmad al-Sharaa as president, after reaching an agreement with him.

Perhaps America’s war on Islam under the pretext of “terrorism,” which it launched in 2001, was part of America’s search for an international justification for its global policies after the fall of socialism. In any case, however, it found Islam to be a severe ideological danger, one that threatened at any moment to become an international political danger, especially after the events of the Arab Spring. America therefore began to suffer from two dilemmas in its international policy, neither less dangerous than the other: China and Islam. If the Chinese danger lies primarily in the economy, the danger of Islam represents a comprehensive and formidable danger. For that reason, America was unable to devote itself fully to China, while leaving the danger of Islam unattended. It came to divide its forces between combating China’s rise and preventing Islam from ruling. This included deepening its support for the Jewish entity and implementing the policy of the “rabid dog”—that dog which began moving rabidly in the war of annihilating Gaza, destroying Syria’s weapons, destroying Lebanon, and destroying Iran’s nuclear program, in an American attempt to restrain the Islamic region and remove its dangers.

If the rise of China and the dangers of Islam’s rise are the two great issues confronting America internationally, there are also lesser international issues that exhaust America, such as North Korea’s nuclear program, Russia’s demands for multipolarity that produced the Ukrainian war, and the slipping of America’s influence in its own western hemisphere. Overall, America found that its grip on the world was loosening, that its international hegemony had been lost and no longer existed; indeed, its superiority itself had become endangered, especially as China’s economy drew closer to it, and China’s major companies began competing with America’s giant corporations. Chinese companies have even begun seizing superiority in certain sectors, such as solar energy, electric vehicles, and Rare Earth Elements (REEs).

Among the manifestations of the loss of American hegemony is that most industry has left America and moved to China. When President Trump, in his first term, sought to pressure China through tariffs, and the coronavirus pandemic came, it became clear to him that America had become dependent on Chinese goods in a way that made its market subordinate to Chinese manufacturing, and that America could not meet the needs of its market in the near term. When the Ukraine war emptied America’s warehouses of certain types of weapons, such as Javelin missiles, whose production America had stopped for some time while relying on its stockpiles, it began searching for old retired experts in this field in an attempt to reproduce this type of weapon. At a time when America had once controlled the rhythm of loans in the world through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, thereby controlling the economies of weak states, China began successfully competing with it in lending. It established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and launched its famous “New Silk Road” project with enormous investments that drown states in debt, threatening to drag them into dependency on the Chinese economy, while America possesses no surplus funds for a similar project. Major Chinese investments reached the Panama Canal, Europe, and even America itself, in addition to flooding Africa and Asia with heavyweight investments, including the construction of ports, railways, factories, and energy pipelines.

Militarily, Russia challenged the West in its war against Ukraine, which exhausted America’s finances and weapons stockpiles. America imposed harsh and comprehensive sanctions on Russia, including depriving it of oil exports, so Russia relied on what came to be called the “shadow fleet” in order to keep money flowing into the Russian treasury, thereby continuing to feed its war against Ukraine. If America felt able to regulate nuclear weapons and their proliferation in the world, North Korea exploited America’s sinking into the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, and registered itself as a new member of the nuclear club. America was forced to halt its agreements with Russia on limiting nuclear weapons because they had become useless in the face of China’s rush to comprehensively develop its nuclear power. In other words, America found that there was no point in restraining Russia at a time when China was breaking free in the manufacture of more nuclear weapons. If Russia’s evasion of American sanctions by using the “shadow fleet” to export oil resembles a game of cat and mouse, with the mouse slipping away from the cat, then Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the recent war is a severe and open challenge to America’s military capabilities and to its naval hegemony over international straits; it approaches a game of cat against cat, despite the strength of the American cat. As for Chinese investments around the world, they are the game of the fat Chinese cat against the American cat. Overall, America has lost its hegemony over the world through the existence of many states to which power has been transferred, partially, totally, or by inheritance, and which have come to stand on their own feet, oppose America, and challenge it, among them Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia. If hegemony is far higher than superiority, because of the great distance separating the hegemon from its adversaries, then America today is struggling to preserve its superiority, and it is not always capable of doing so in every circumstance.

America stopped to consider the way by which it could preserve its international standing before it was driven forward by events and the wars then underway, along with the enormous expenditures it was incurring, the astronomical debts burdening it, and the depletion of its stockpiles of military ammunition. Here, over more than a decade, America differed over its course and became divided over the priorities of its policy. President Trump came in his first term and withdrew from the climate agreement; then Biden came as a Democratic president and returned America to the agreement; then Trump returned as president once again and pulled America out of the agreement. The same applies to America’s policy toward its European allies within NATO and in the Islamic region. True of them is the saying of Allah (swt) who said,

[كُلَّمَا دَخَلَتۡ أُمَّةٞ لَّعَنَتۡ أُخۡتَهَاۖ]

“Whenever a people entered, it cursed its sister people” [TMQ Surah Al-A’raaf: 38]. This division began to envelop political life in America, most prominently in immigration policies, racism against the Afro-American people, the extreme emergence of white supremacy groups, the storming of Congress, and the refusal to recognize the result of the presidential election. Thus, American division was added as a new dilemma among the major dilemmas confronting America. Although it is an internal dilemma, its effect is severe on the future of the American state, its international image, and its foreign policy.

The American president, Trump, returned to power in early 2025 with countless major problems before him that had to be solved quickly. These problems, and his conception of their solutions, may be described as follows:

First: Trump found that the Ukrainian war had shifted American attention from China to Russia, and that American involvement in the requirements of the war was emptying America’s weapons stockpiles and its treasuries of money, threatening the possibility of its direct involvement in Russia’s war, and distancing it from the path of combating China’s rise. Yet he also found in it an opportunity to separate Russia from China and exhaust Europe financially.

Second: Trump likewise found that the war of the Jewish entity in Gaza was magnifying the Islamic dangers in the region. Yet he was compelled to continue involvement in completing and finishing it, including the arenas of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, in the hope that the policy of the “rabid dog” would succeed—a policy through which he wished to leave the region easy prey for the Jewish entity.

Third: The continued rise of China. He therefore began attacking China and the rest of the world with his protectionist policies, imposing tariffs left and right, and announcing his intention to return the wheel of industry to America.

Fourth: Attacking the Democrats and the American left, launching harsh policies against immigrants, and establishing the “government efficiency body” to cleanse state institutions of Democrats and opponents of his policies, as well as to cleanse the Pentagon and the army of generals opposed to his policies.

These are the major problems from which America suffers and which it strains itself to solve. Upon closer examination, however, we find that the American dilemma is far deeper than these problems. If the state and the nation in America were in good health, they would have good opportunities to solve these international problems and preserve their standing around the world. However, the state in America, together with the nation, is diseased; neither possesses the health that would qualify it to provide the resources of power necessary for the state to set out and remove those international nightmares from the way of its standing.

If the Soviet economy failed to provide the resources needed to stand before the arms race—the last of which was America’s “Star Wars” program—so that Russia saw its path to salvation in Gorbachev’s reforms, a path that continued dragging it toward the bottom, then America today stands before a dilemma close to that Soviet one.

From its government revenues of $5 trillion in 2025, the state in America paid more than $1 trillion to service its debts—riba (interest)—which had exceeded $38 trillion. It paid $1.6 trillion to retirees under social security programs, nearly $2 trillion to health insurance programs, and nearly $1 trillion in defense spending, the “Pentagon budget.” It then covered the remaining government expenditures, only to find itself borrowing anew by $1.8 trillion—all of this in 2025. As the debt increases annually, its riba-based interest also increases. This condition was described by John Bolton, the former national security adviser, as a severe danger to national security.

For America to remedy its condition, it must increase its resources. This is possible through raising taxes. Yet state economies are extremely sensitive to tax increases: if America raises taxes on its companies, those companies flee abroad—to China, for example. Since America is a capitalist state, its politicians work in the service of its capitalists, and these capitalists want taxes reduced. In America, they have multiple lobbies through which they influence decision-makers, from the Speaker of Congress to its members, and they possess influence over the government. Among the manifestations of this was President Trump’s appointment of one of America’s largest capitalists, Elon Musk—the owner of Tesla, the electric vehicle company; SpaceX, the company of rockets, spacecraft, and satellites used to operate the Starlink internet network—to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Among his achievements in this position was removing senior directors in the Pentagon from their posts and appointing people loyal to him, in order to facilitate his major contracts, worth billions, with the Pentagon. A year after this appointment, Elon Musk demanded that the price of Starlink services, which provide information to the US army fighting Iran, be multiplied; this increase amounted to five times the price agreed upon before the war. Today, Elon Musk has offered SpaceX for public subscription in order to collect $80 billion in one stroke, not to mention his demands to reduce taxes on electric vehicles by ending government programs that support competing companies, among them the Ford Motor Company. As a result, the media today are speaking of the announcement of Elon Musk as the first trillionaire in the world—that is, the owner of one thousand billion dollars.

This story is only one of many daily stories through which America’s capitalists plunder the resources of the state; indeed, the laws facilitate for them the plundering of the American people. Overall, the taxes paid by America’s giant corporations are decreasing, and as they decrease, government revenues weaken. No American president can fully reverse this trend. A president may come to power and work in favor of certain companies while leaving others aside for many considerations, including American factionalist division—as in the policy of the Democratic president Biden, which served the technology companies that support the Democrats and restricted the energy companies loyal to the Republicans. Although this only added fuel to the fire of division in America, reversing the equation—from a state that serves companies to companies that serve the state—is among the impossibilities of the American political system, given the vast influence of capitalists in America, and the dependence of politicians and their parties on the financing of these companies for elections and for success. Overall, tax revenues from major corporations in America are declining. After forming 11% of total revenues in 2015, they reached 6% in 2020. If this percentage increased somewhat after 2020, that was not the result of an increase in corporate tax rates, but rather because of the enormous inflation in the capital of technology companies—that is, the increased empowerment of these companies to plunder the American people and plunder the world. For example, Elon Musk, mentioned above, saw his wealth grow from $13 billion in 2015 to $170 billion in 2020, then, a few weeks ago, to an estimated $800 billion, before becoming, only days later, $1 trillion. Musk gathered most of this through government contracts—the taxes of Americans—through enormous profits from his companies inside America and around the world, and through the rise in the shares of those companies.

Another example of the control of companies over the state is that arms companies, in addition to the weapons contracts they supply to the US Department of War, the Pentagon, push the state toward igniting wars around the world so that the need for their weapons increases and their profits grow. Among the important matters that must be observed in the plunder of the state by arms companies is that the weapons these companies sell are always of the extremely expensive kind, to the point that it has been said that sometimes an interceptor missile worth $1 million is fired to shoot down a primitive missile worth $1,000. In general, the price of the military equipment used by the US armed forces, and the fees for maintenance services that companies provide for aircraft, tanks, and other weapons, exceed their counterparts around the world many times over. This is not necessarily because they are superior to others, as the Americans promote, but because arms companies work constantly and through crooked methods to multiply their profits in their contracts with the Pentagon. They have men in sensitive positions inside the Pentagon who continually push the state toward accepting these high prices for the war industry. For example, the Chinese aircraft used by Pakistan’s armed forces performed well against Indian aircraft in 2025, and their price is far lower than their American counterparts. All the propaganda America promotes about the quality and effectiveness of its weapons does not correspond to the extremely high price of these weapons. Cheap Russian weapons competently face Ukraine’s expensive American weapons. The same applies to the rest of the major American companies that depend on government contracts, including the major pharmaceutical companies such as the Koch brothers, which flourish and see their profits grow through government programs such as health insurance.

There are other aspects to the dilemma of the American capitalist system. The success of companies and the growing profits of the past three decades have been concentrated in the technology sector, as well as in the stock markets—most famously Wall Street—and in the financial trade sector generally. This has produced a new anti-industrial idea that dominates the minds of Americans, especially their youth, who do not wish to work in any sector requiring hard labor, and instead dream of rapidly becoming rich. Industrial profits are usually slow, whereas stock profits may quickly move a young person from poverty to wealth. In other words, Americans are turning away from industry, recoiling from its hardships, and dreaming of quick profit. This idea confirms that America’s withering today was planted by the seeds of excessive prosperity within society. This idea, together with the rejection of rough labor, has today become a dilemma and an obstacle before the reindustrialization of America and its ability to dispense with China. Among the seeds of excessive prosperity are the obligations of the American government toward its citizens in social security and health care, until these, together with military costs—the Pentagon budget—have come to consume 80% of America’s financial revenues.

Another aspect of the dilemma is inflation that does not stop. This inflation in America stems from two causes:

The first cause: riba (interest). Most investment projects in America depend on loans, and banks grant money through riba. It therefore becomes the function of the American producer to create a commodity or service whose price, in principle, rises annually by the amount of riba he pays to the bank that lent to him. This riba is what explains why the state in America sees its task as keeping inflation at 2%.

The second cause: the monetary policies of the US Federal Reserve, in terms of raising or lowering the interest rate—riba—as well as the issue of creating new dollars through digital electronic balances or paper dollars printed by the US Treasury after being brought into existence by the Federal Reserve. Whenever new dollars are created, or interest is lowered at the Federal Reserve, the value of the dollar falls against goods and services, and their prices rise. This US Federal Reserve—the central bank—is not a government body. Instead, it is a hybrid body in which private banks are members of the regional Federal Reserve banks that make up the central reserve, whose Board of Governors is appointed by the government. In other words, it profits from lending return to private commercial banks and to the US Treasury—that is, to the private sector and the government at the same time.

This American dilemma is the essence of the corruption of the capitalist system. The private sector has a major role, even if indirectly, in issuing new dollars through the Federal Reserve central bank. This does not serve only the state, but also those capitalists who tamper with the value of the currency, the government bond market, and interest rates. In the final analysis, the capitalists in America gnaw away at the state legally; and where no law exists for them, they bring such a law into existence through their lobbies that exert pressure on Congress. They gnaw away at the American people through riba, through government contracts, and through many other facilities. Likewise, they gnaw away at the entire world. As a result of this gnawing, the wealth of the capitalists grows ever greater, while the resources available to the government for international deployment in the policies and wars of the state continue to diminish.

To be continued…