Trumpism Through the Lens of Arrighi: A Sign of American Hegemony in Crisis

When Donald Trump returned to the center of global politics, commentators rushed to explain the phenomenon through the familiar vocabulary of populism, nationalism and electoral strategy. A new open-access study published in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance argues that this vocabulary misses the deeper structure of what is happening. Gennaro Imbriano of the University of Bologna turns instead to the work of Giovanni Arrighi, the Italian sociologist and world-systems theorist who spent his career mapping the long rhythms of global capitalism. Read through Arrighi’s categories, the study suggests, Trumpism is not an aberration but a symptom: the visible expression of a crisis in American global hegemony and of a hegemonic transition that has already begun but has not yet found its destination.

Arrighi, who taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton’s Fernand Braudel Center and later at Johns Hopkins University, built his theory in dialogue with the founders of dependency theory and world-systems analysis, including Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein. The starting point of that tradition is deceptively simple: states cannot be understood in isolation. The world is a single, unified system in which economic actors, above all corporations, have become political actors in their own right, often more powerful than the nation-states that host them. Within this system, some nations occupy the core while others are pushed to the periphery, and the relationship between the two is not accidental but structural.

Frank’s version of dependency theory, developed in the 1960s, described the mechanism in starkly extractive terms. Core powers draw raw materials and cheap labor from peripheral nations, process them into finished goods, and sell those goods back at high prices, flooding local markets and preventing indigenous industry from developing. Underdevelopment in the periphery, in this account, is not a failure to modernize but the very condition that makes development in the core possible. Colonial monocultures, such as tea cultivation in India, and later mechanisms like production relocation and international loans, all served to lock peripheral economies into dependency. Latin American critics of the theory, from Ruy Mauro Marini to Theotonio dos Santos, went on to identify escape routes: building domestic industry behind protective walls, detaching from a weakening hegemon, or pursuing revolutionary rupture.

Wallerstein took these insights and scaled them up. In his four-volume The Modern World-System, he replaced the dyadic core-periphery model with a tripartite structure that included semi-peripheral countries such as Brazil, India and China, states that aspire to core status and progressively move closer to it. Drawing on Marx’s analysis of capitalism and Fernand Braudel’s attention to long-term processes, Wallerstein distinguished centralized world-empires, which extract taxes from their peripheries, from the decentralized capitalist world-system that emerged in the sixteenth century, in which the periphery supplies cheap raw materials and labor while the core monopolizes high-value production. It was within this intellectual milieu that Arrighi developed his own distinctive contribution.

Arrighi’s masterwork, The Long Twentieth Century, first published in 1994, proposed that the history of capitalism unfolds in a series of systemic cycles of accumulation stretching back to the fifteenth century. Each cycle begins with the productive expansion of capital, money invested in commodity production, described by the Marxian formula M-C, and ends when overaccumulation sets in and a signal crisis marks the turning point. At that moment capital retreats from production into finance, the C-M’ phase, and the accumulated wealth is lent out to finance the next cycle, typically under new leadership. Arrighi identified four such long centuries: the Genoese cycle from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, the Dutch cycle through the mid-eighteenth century, the British cycle through the late nineteenth century, and the American cycle, whose signal crisis arrived in the 1970s amid the Vietnam War and the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order.

The pattern behind these cycles is remarkably regular. Each hegemonic power operates on a progressively larger state scale, from the city-state of Genoa to the Dutch Republic, the British Empire and the American world system. Some cycles, notably the Genoese and British, are characterized by extensive development, while the Dutch and American cycles show intensive development. Over time, hegemonic powers internalize more functions: Genoa remained a purely commercial republic, while later powers secured their own protection, production and transaction costs. Crucially, in each transition the declining hegemon becomes a creditor to its successor, financing with its accumulated capital the very power that will displace it. Arrighi saw exactly this dynamic in the relationship between the United States and China: after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, its export-led industrial expansion generated financial power sufficient to help finance American external debt.

In Adam Smith in Beijing, published in 2007, Arrighi turned to the shift in the epicenter of capital accumulation toward East Asia. China’s rise, in his reading, was the result of deliberate policies that moved the country from semi-peripheral status toward an economic model capable of challenging American primacy, based on industrial production for export at precisely the moment when Western economies were deindustrializing and offshoring. Trumpism, in Imbriano’s analysis, is best understood as an attempt to interrupt this process: a repositioning of American military and commercial power in the Western hemisphere, an authoritarian shift within the liberal system, and a concerted effort to curb the economic and military ascent of China. Its two key instruments are disengagement from distant conflicts and an intensification of pressure, through NATO’s eastern expansion in Europe and through the trade war against Beijing.

Yet the study finds that this response appears insufficient. The threat of tariffs has not redirected the economic strategies of American competitors, and the attempt to revive industrialization on American soil faces formidable obstacles. The evidence from Latin America illustrates the difficulty: trade between the region and China has grown substantially in recent decades, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative has supported infrastructural development that reduced Latin American dependency on the United States, even if the relationship still reproduces a pattern of raw material exports and manufactured imports that has not always fostered local industry. Meanwhile, European allies bound to Washington find themselves pressured to curtail economic ties with Asian partners and Russia, a course that conflicts with their own development interests.

Arrighi identified two anomalies in the current transition that make it unlike any previous one. First, the economic power of the emerging hegemon is separated from the military power of the declining one, a configuration without precedent in earlier cycles. Second, the new leading power may develop its accumulation in a form that is not capitalist in the conventional sense, opening the possibility, in Arrighi’s optimistic reading, of a system based on mutual respect between civilizations and a genuinely multipolar world order. But this outcome presupposes that the United States accepts its transition peacefully. In Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, written with Beverly Silver in 1999, Arrighi warned that transitions can stall, degenerate into prolonged systemic chaos, or be governed through war. The study concludes that Trumpism, as a product of hegemonic crisis, leaves both paths open: a negotiated multipolar order of peace, or a new systemic chaos of financial and military tension among competing regional powers. Which of these futures prevails, the analysis insists, is not mechanically determined, and that open question is precisely what makes Arrighi’s long view of capitalism so illuminating for the present.

Subject of Research: Applying Giovanni Arrighi's world-systems theory of hegemonic transitions to Trumpism and the crisis of United States global hegemony

Article Title: Trumpism, the world system and multipolarism: a perspective from Giovanni Arrighi’s thought

Article References: Imbriano, G. (2025). Trumpism, the world system and multipolarism: a perspective from Giovanni Arrighi’s thought. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 329-339. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00135-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00135-7

Keywords: Giovanni Arrighi, Trumpism, world-systems theory, hegemonic transition, multipolarism, United States, China, dependency theory, Immanuel Wallerstein, global governance, systemic cycles of accumulation, American decline