Trump's Geo-Politics: Correcting the Imperial Model & Shaping the Incoming Economic Architecture

Alastair Crooke, 11 Dec 2025

In his speech in Riyadh in May, President Trump set out his rationale to his transactional mode of policy formulation -- making peace through commerce, rather than war.

The language in the 4 December US National Security Strategy (NSS) takes this several steps further: It is couched in the terms of ‘regions of influence’, rather than hegemony, and of managing stakeholder financial interests. It abandons the phraseology of a rules-based order and eschews appeals to democracy and Western values.

But what does this ‘peace through commerce’ really mean?

The core to the Trump geo-politics is revealed in the NSS as the risk of imperial collapse looming in the future. It talks about Atlas holding the globe aloft, and emphasises that the US can no longer continue to shoulder the burden of empire.

The NSS, therefore, is ultimately centred around resolving the economic contradictions that has brought the US to this pass -- burgeoning debt and an out-of-control fiscal matrix which, absent a solution, ordains that Empire will fold.

The core issue therefore becomes how to finance ‘Empire’ against a badly skewed and distorted economic reality. Clearly, the start point was to acknowledge that sanctions have failed. The attempt to lock China (and by extension Russia) out of the economic loop has failed, because they adapted and strengthened their internal economies — and in China’s case, enhanced their relevance to international supply chains.