The hunger for capital and raw materials which drives Donald Trump's challenges is indicative of the anxieties of the leading imperialisms, pressured by the steady maturation of Chinese imperialism. American power is in relative decline, and although still the best equipped, it does not have sufficient strength to continue playing the role of a hegemonic power, as it has done more or less since 1945 amid numerous crises.
In 1973, Charles Kindleberger [1910-2003], an important historian of the Great Depression, derived from the historical experience of the hegemonic systems of the United Kingdom and the United States five imperatives concerning the role of the leader or stabiliser
country: 1) maintain a relatively open market for surplus goods; 2) provide long-term countercyclical or at least stable loans; 3) maintain a relatively stable exchange rate system; 4) ensure the coordination of macroeconomic policies; 5) act as lender of last resort through discounting or providing liquidity in financial crises. The unilateral America First
line, tariffs as a universal panacea, the hypothetical one-sided monetary pact of Mar-a-Lago, the idea of an American golden age
financed by the rest of the world, and the commodification of leadership and alliances all point in the opposite direction. The Federal Reserve, attacked and reviled, is the institution that should act as the global leader of last resort.
In his liberal view, Kindleberger omits military force, which was widely used by both London and Washington, both on the battlefield and as a deterrent. But it would be difficult to place Trump even within coercive hegemonic theories that envisage the use of force as a means of enforcing rules. What rules? The only limits Trump recognizes are, by his own admission, his morality
and his mind
. The assault on Venezuela and the decapitation of Nicolás Maduro's regime, the bombing of Iran, and the threats to annex Canada and Greenland are aimed at the appropriation of resources and the geopolitical security of the United States alone.
Fracking and LNG
In the years following the global financial crisis of 2008-09, the world's energy map underwent three major changes. First, technology for fracturing underground rock formations permeated with gas and oil led to an influx of thousands of independent drillers into the basins of the new black gold
, shale gas and shale oil. With the impetus of the world's leading financial and technological power, for a decade two-thirds of the United States' net industrial investment was poured into this new energy source. Thanks to this investment, backed by the banks, the US became the world's leading energy power and a major exporter of shale gas in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Since 2015, global LNG consumption has grown at twice the rate of natural gas, and since 2023, LNG has become dominant in long-distance gas transport. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2030, an additional LNG production and export capacity of 300 billion cubic metres (bcm) will come online; half of this new capacity is under construction in the US and a quarter in Qatar. The IEA fears that there will be an imbalance between the huge increase in capacity and the increase in demand for LNG, which is expected to be only
200 bcm.
Production redundancy is inherent in the way the energy sector operates, especially since energy has become a political weapon among the major powers. On the one hand, activities that consume unimaginable amounts of energy, such as artificial intelligence data centres and cryptocurrencies, are emerging. On the other hand, this is an era of profound change in energy flows: redundancy may serve to further accelerate the replacement of coal in electricity generation, which, in emerging Asian countries, is absorbing 30% of the new demand for natural gas. This process has also occurred in the United States, where coal's use as a fuel for power plants has fallen from 50% in 2007 to 15% in 2024, while natural gas has grown from 20% to 45%. These are highly differentiated processes. Germany replaced nuclear power, abandoned after Fukushima, and some of the coal in its power stations with wind and solar energy (52% of the total) rather than gas, despite massive imports of Russian gas, for as long as that lasted. China remains the largest and still growing user of coal in power stations, despite its extensive use of renewables (over 20%).
Withered Green
The second change was initially driven by Europe, while the US achieved energy primacy, overtaking both Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil production in 2014. The dramatic dependence on Russian gas and the strategic power shift represented by US shale, formed the basis for Europe's launch of its own long-term model of energy self-sufficiency, centred on renewable energy, the electrification of transport and civil consumption, and the decarbonisation of industrial consumption. The 2015 Paris Agreement was presented as a global model for climate stabilisation and planet protection. The goal of zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is more than ambitious — unrealistic, according to some — because it would disrupt lifestyles and their costs within a generation. It would require a fivefold increase in the share of renewable energy in the global energy supply, from 13% in 2024 to 70% in 2050, and a threefold increase in electricity generation (from 32% to 90%).
The path is bumpy and contested: under Trump, the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement twice, in 2020 and 2025. There is resistance to the phasing out of combustion engines from large sections of the population, several automotive groups, and the most energy-intensive industrial sectors; furthermore, the disintegration of coalitions of large financial groups created to support the green economy, which have nevertheless issued hundreds of billions of green bonds, and the illusory attempts to involve the petro-States in the electric transition have slowed down the energy plan of old Europe and extended its timeframe.
While China pushed ahead with determination in the energy transition, with its share of global renewable energy supply growing from 10% to 22% between 2010 and 2024, the share of the European Union fell from 18% to 14% and that of the United States from 15% to 13%. In 2024, China added more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. What began as a European initiative grew into a Chinese one, embodied in 2025 by the staggering export of seven million electric vehicles.
The green economy has developed a series of technological innovations, leading the way in research on critical minerals and rare earths; the heralds of digital civilisation and artificial intelligence have joined the mission. Rearmament will want its share.
The disruption of gas pipelines
The third change was triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the severe energy crisis that followed in Europe. European sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions reduced Russian gas supplies from 155 billion cubic metres in 2021 to 52 in 2024 and 39 in 2025. According to data published by the European Council, the missing 100 bcm from Russia has only been partially replaced by additional supplies of American and Norwegian LNG. Even for the Russians, the 100 bcm lost in Europe has only been partially recovered in Asia. OPEC reports a decline in total Russian gas exports from 244 bcm before the war to 159 bcm at the end of 2024. China has purchased 40 bcm, but only after 2030 will it perhaps take another 50, when the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline passing through Mongolia comes into operation, assuming it does. The Energy Information Administration noted last September that no agreement has yet been reached on the contractual terms between Russia and China for this project, which will require the construction of 2,000 miles of new pipelines. From 2026, Ukraine will permanently stop all Russian gas transit through its territory.
The energy Rapallo
that lay at the heart of German and European Ostpolitik and weathered the storms of the Cold War and the global financial crisis seems set to remain a closed chapter for a long time to come, at least as far as gas pipelines are concerned. The ledger of Russian LNG, however, may remain open.
The weaponisation of prices
When large fluctuations in energy prices occur, they move many pieces on the global chessboard. Their explosion after the two oil crises of the 1970s inflated oil and gas rents in the petro-States, creating one of the conditions — the financial one — for the bloody war between Iran and Iraq and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. In 1985-86, the counter-shock of low fuel prices began, lasting about ten years; in the second half of the 1980s, it crushed revenues, caught the belligerents off guard, and played an important role in the implosion of the Russian empire.
In his book The New Map [2020], Daniel Yergin outlines the dynamics that characterised energy prices in the first two decades of our century. He calls the decade between 2003 and 2013 the BRIC era
(an acronym of the major emerging powers: Brazil, Russia, India, and China), during which these countries enjoyed the extraordinary growth of the commodity supercycle
: the BRIC countries stockpiled essential raw materials; prices of oil, copper, iron ore, and other commodities rose; and emerging countries supported open markets and globalisation. During these years, the Chinese economy grew by two and a half times, India's by two times, while the world economy expanded by 30%. In this cycle, investment in American shale grew with less fanfare. Oil prices remained stable at $100 per barrel for three years, between 2011 and 2013. It was a period of profound social and political upheaval in the Middle East, with the Arab Spring
uprisings, the fall of rulers, destruction affecting oil companies in Nigeria, and dramatic impoverishment of the populations of Venezuela and Iran. Prices began to fall in the autumn of 2014, and by early 2016 they had fallen below $30 per barrel.
Two middle powers put to the test
The decisive factor was the abundance of American shale, which, by driving down prices, further weakened oil rents and made the market immune to blackmail by Iran, which was developing its nuclear programme. According to Yergin, without shale, Tehran would not have sat down at the negotiating table and the agreement to limit its programme would not have been reached in July 2015, with the withdrawal of anti-Iranian sanctions. The agreement was then torn up by the recently inaugurated President Trump in 2018. Meanwhile, to address the price emergency, an alliance was formed in November 2016 between OPEC and ten non-OPEC countries, including Mexico, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Oman, and Russia, which led the group. The new grouping, called OPEC Plus or the Vienna alliance
, decided to cut production by 1.2 million barrels per day (mbd). According to Yergin, this was an act of geopolitical reordering
centred on the Saudi Arabia-Russia partnership, which cemented Moscow's return to the Middle East.
The stabilisation of prices was facilitated, according to Yergin, by the production disaster in Venezuela, which went from 3.3 mbd at the end of the 1990s to 0.6 mbd at the end of 2019 (0.96 mbd in 2024, according to the Italian multinational energy company ENI). Venezuela's oil sector, deprived of investment and managerial expertise and left by Maduro in the hands of the military, sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves — 303 billion barrels, six times US reserves. Yet, it lacks the capital to extract and refine them. American and European oil companies and refineries would have the capital, but without iron-clad guarantees the commercial case is far from obvious. The Economist is sceptical: These days any old barrels won't do: they should be low-cost and low-risk. Venezuelan ones are neither
.
The fate of a country whose minister of mines, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, together with his Saudi counterpart Abdullah Tariki, devised the first plan for the formation of OPEC in 1960, gives pause for thought. It also makes one reflect on the fate of a country that was a millennial empire, Iran, and which held the first general secretariat of the oil cartel with Fuad Rouhani who was adviser in the post-war period to both Mossadeq for the nationalisation of oil, and later to the Shah. Two countries rich in resources and proletarian youth, reduced to pariah States by greedy and inept bourgeoisies, held in check by the chamberlains of imperialism.