Tribune | 28 January 2026
The law of the jungle
By Nick Dearden
Nick Dearden is the director of Global Justice Now.
Last week, Donald Trump did more than ruffle feathers as the rich and powerful met for their annual get-together in the Swiss mountain retreat. His tariff threats over Greenland finally awakened world leaders from their slumber. Seemingly, they have now realised that Trump can’t be ‘managed’ after all, and he represents a fundamental break in the world order. Kidnapping the leader of a Latin American country might be regrettable, but threatening members of NATO is another matter entirely.
And yet, too many leaders still appear to believe the problem is that Trump’s ever eccentric mind has cracked — that he’s threatening to pull the whole house down because he wants possession of a country covered in ice with a tiny population, where he can do pretty much anything he wants anyway. This is a profound (and dangerous) misreading of the situation. Trump might be a narcissist and a megalomaniac, but he isn’t crazy; in fact, on many issues, he’s had a remarkably consistent approach, albeit employing erratic tactics to get his way. At the heart of it, the president has a plan to tear down the pillars of the old world order and create a new one.
We have a reasonable idea as to what that would look like. Trump would, more than likely, replace international law altogether and divide the world into geopolitical spheres of interest. Neoliberal assumptions around free trade, free markets, and global supply chains would be jettisoned in favour of an explicit merging of corporate, state, and personal interests, and the use of economic policy to beggar your neighbour.
It is true, of course, that international norms today have been applied highly unequally, with massive doses of hypocrisy from the rich world. Trade has always been a weapon used by the rich to disadvantage the poor, and free market rules are always waived when the interests of the rich are at stake. There has never really been a distinction between geopolitics and the international economy.
However, accepting this cannot blind us to the fact that Trump still represents a huge change, just as the brave residents of Minnesota are discovering that there is a difference between living in a sham democracy and living in a lawless state where only force matters. Internationally, that change will go to the heart of how international capitalism itself works. This was arguably best summed up in a much lauded speech by Canada’s liberal prime minister, Mark Carney:
“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes… This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
Carney was right, too, that this is not an aberration. Whatever happens to Trump personally, the world system has broken down for deeper reasons — of which Trump is only a symptom, namely an economy which has driven inequality to such mind-blowing levels that it has torn our society apart, permanently devastating the environment which we depend on. And now, to have any hope of challenging Trump, we need to understand he represents something more than madness.
The International Economy
Trump’s view on the international economy clearly incorporates elements of the nineteenth-century world of ‘great power’ rivalry — but it is closer to the world of the first decades of the twentieth century, where the crises and contradictions of capitalism inexorably led to a global war.
We do not really have a fascist theory of economics, just the economic actions of fascist governments in power. But those governments share much with Trump. His mafia-style of government clearly resembles President Franklin D Roosevelt’s conception of fascism as the ‘ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power’. There is a breakdown in any distinction between personal, corporate, and state interests. Trump wields massive state power in the explicit interest of his family and friends.
Yet, fascism represents something deeper than economics as a sophisticated form of looting. In Germany in the 1930s, many understood that fascism was a product of monopoly capitalism, and an answer to the severe crises of political legitimacy and economic sustainability which corporations faced. The answer fascism provided included the removal of political opposition to big business, while also using the full force of state power to drive corporate profits and incorporate that profit-making into a fully world-dominating project, from which war became inevitable.
Trump, like his predecessors in the 1930s, is comfortable using economic warfare or real warfare to enrich the biggest corporations in history, boosting state subsidies and public protection to levels never before seen, even taking a decisive public stake in companies where necessary. The biggest winners from Trump’s second term have been the very richest corporate barons — the handful of tech giants who have made hundreds of billions of dollars in the last year thanks to his policies.
Venezuela and Greenland
In recent weeks, there has been much commentary that Trump’s policies don’t seem to fit this model, though, and that his actions are actually nonsensical and can only be the product of an unhinged mind. Trump has said, openly, that the invasion of Venezuela was about control of oil. And yet, many oil companies seem reluctant to invest in an unstable country and a sector that will require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment. Trump’s UN ambassador said Greenland is about controlling critical minerals required to make military and other high-tech products — but digging them up is no easy task.
This scepticism, however, misses the point. Trump is not a puppet of capitalists — he sees his role as restructuring the way capitalism functions. Opposition from the ‘woke’ corporate bureaucrats, comfortable with the liberal rules-based order, is surely only to be expected. Trump wants to transform that mindset, bullying those at the top of the corporate world into integrating with his political project, just as Mussolini and Hitler did one hundred years ago.
The US president is working on two timelines. In the short term, he is interested in the accumulation of immediate profits by the red-blooded investors who surround him (they reportedly made a killing on projections of political change in Venezuela). Meanwhile, investors close to Trump are engaged in prospects for an ultra-libertarian crypto state in Greenland, which is similar to an enclave they already control in Honduras. It might all seem far out, but we should remember that such speculation — mostly centred on AI — is currently keeping the US stock market afloat.
Then, there are long-term goals too. In a world defined by inter-power rivalry, control of potentially important resources is vitally important. Venezuela’s massive oil reserves need to be under the control of the US, not least in case they fall under the control of China, which was buying much of Venezuela’s limited supply of oil before the invasion.
The economist Gabriel Zucman has pointed out that there was a time when ‘profits earned by US oil companies in Venezuela were roughly equal to the profits earned by all U.S. multinationals — across all industries — in the rest of Latin America and in all continental European countries combined.’ Like the rest of the western hemisphere, Venezuela can no longer be allowed to exist outside of the US orbit. So while the economy might take many years to develop, the relationship of control is restored, and big corporations, notably Chevron, are already playing the long game.
There are similar arguments to be made about Greenland’s vast wealth, which is currently locked away by the country’s strong environmental protection, specifically the prohibition on private land ownership, uranium mining, and oil exploration. Greenland probably sits atop a massive proportion of the world’s rare Earth minerals, not to mention large quantities of uranium. For sure, exploitation is tough, but the environment is, worryingly, rapidly changing, and opening up new sea lanes that have attracted the interest of Russia and China, prompting, in the latter case, plans for a ‘polar silk road.’
It is simply untrue to say the US can already do what it wants in Greenland. It cannot change laws that would allow them to dig up these minerals, nor therefore commit to the enormous investment necessary to make it feasible.
A Fatal Mistake
The claim here is not that Trump is working to a detailed blueprint, or that every one of his actions is going to work out for him, any more than the fascist governments that went before. But that doesn’t make his plans irrational, and if we dismiss Trump as a ‘madman’, we’re making a fatal mistake — one that appears to have been made by Keir Starmer and other Western leaders.
It’s perhaps understandable that if you’re dealing with someone irrational and dangerous, you want to calm them down while waiting for help (in this case, an election) to arrive. Unable to accept that we are not about to return to the global economy of the 1990s, many in the political centre have chosen this option. But that’s not the strategy we need to address a problem like Trump. This has empowered a man who sees weakness and accommodation as a green flag to push further.
We need a plan, and that plan must include retaliation, a break with our dependence on the US, and the building of alternative forms of economic cooperation with like-minded countries, not least in the Global South. Some policy actions can fulfil all three objectives. They’re the best chance we have of defeating Trump within the US — proving to some of his softer supporters that he really can’t bring home the goods — and of building an economy which can undermine the far right in Europe and around the world.
Retaliation is often viewed only as tit-for-tat tariffs. Tariffs might well be part of the policies we need to adopt, but such a policy also risks inflation and shortages, at least in the short term. Better is to look at those trade policies where we have most power, where action would inflict more pain on Trump’s corporate supporters and where we would gain most independence, for example, limiting access of US corporations to European procurement contracts, refusing to cooperate on certain intellectual property rules, and regulating finance and technology in a way which overtly impacts on the profits of Big Tech and Big Finance. Such policies are precisely the sort of actions that could be triggered under the EU’s so-called ‘traded bazooka’, which European capitals threatened over Greenland.
Of course, these policies will also cause disruption and some pain more generally, not least if the US retaliates in return. But we need to be honest with people here, unwinding the over-extended, ‘market knows best’ global economy has to happen. And we cannot continue to live in a world where every aspect of our economy is so dependent on an increasingly hostile foreign power, unless we are simply giving up on any notion of sovereignty and accept that we must follow the US down the road of fascism.
If we get it right, there will also be huge benefits. In a piece in the Guardian, Cory Doctorow explains what one part of these policies might mean concretely. To date, we’ve been forced to lock almost all of high-tech products — from phones and computers, to farming machinery and even weapons systems — behind rules that prevent us from properly controlling these technologies. ‘This is one thing that leads to what I refer to as the enshittification of technology,’ says Doctorow. It also prevents us from developing our own industries, and turns us into vassals of Zuckerberg, Musk and co, who can ‘extract hundreds of billions in rents and junk fees from all over the world’, not to mention using our data to make still more money.
Now, as Doctorow says, ‘The old bargain — put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports — is dead.’ We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change the rules and reclaim our sovereignty by refusing to abide by anti-circumvention laws, for instance, that prevent us from messing around with what happens ‘under the bonnet’ of these products.
In this, we are going further than Carney, whose answer to Trump is to double down on the deregulatory, free-market trade deals he signs with other countries. In dealing with Trump, we’ve got to rethink not just who we work with, but how we cooperate with other countries, rejecting the deeply unpopular race-to-the-bottom trade system, anger towards which fuels the growth of the far right, and replacing it with a model that allows us to restore control over our economies while cooperating to protect and improve standards.
To beat Trump, we must declare independence from the US — but we can only beat fascist economics with genuinely democratic economics.
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