The World Needs American Socialism

Socialism in America isn’t just a domestic necessity: it is a global imperative.

American hegemony means billions of people, myself included, must daily follow its politics because its spillover effects shape our lives. American militarism, environmental destruction, and structural inequality have global reach. When the American state makes our lives its business, we have to make its life our business. That is why I write these words as an Arab immigrant living in Canada.

The scale of the American empire’s footprint across time and space is overwhelming: from Vietnam to Nicaragua, Chile to the Philippines, Palestine to Cuba, Afghanistan to Haiti—all carry the marks of American governance and global hegemony. America’s influence is manifest in its global network of military bases, trillion-dollar military-industrial complex, and greenhouse gas emissions that make it the leading contributor to climate catastrophe.

The U.S. has long exported its violence and secured favorable conditions for American capital, be it through CIA-led regime changes ^[1] or the global financial hierarchy led by institutions like the IMF and World Bank,^[2] both conveniently headquartered in Washington D.C. Time and again, they have drowned countries in debt and neoliberal reforms that deepen inequality and convert their natures into export monocultures.^[3] These mechanisms of control are not anomalies—they’re essential features of the American project since at least taking over from Britain as global hegemon post-WWII.

Viewpoint as an Arab

Living as an Arab today means experiencing and watching American policies devastate the SWANA region. While local regimes also bear responsibility for our dispossession, American interference consistently sabotages our ability to chart independent futures. The U.S. has carried out blatant attacks on our sovereignty and upheld an apartheid regime in the heart of our world, in Palestine. It has shaped our region to secure its access to oil and crush revolutionary movements that challenge its imperial dominance.

From orchestrating the 1953 CIA coup in Iran that overthrew prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized ^[4] Iranian oil to the petrodollar system established through the U.S.-Saudi agreements in the 1970s,^[5] the region’s oil wealth was converted into a pillar of global capitalism. It allowed the U.S. to dominate global markets while suppressing any efforts by Arab nations to reclaim their resources. Direct interventions, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, displaced millions, fueled extremism, and enabled record profits for Big Oil as well as corporations contracted by the American government to supply arms and build prisons.^[6]

During the Arab Spring, the U.S., in line with its allies Israel and the Gulf Arab states,^[7] threw its weight behind reactionary forces under the guise of ensuring “stability.” In Egypt, the most populous country in the region, it backed the 2013 military coup that overthrew the elected government of Mohamed Morsi, installing the brutally repressive Sisi regime, which has since jailed thousands of activists and dissidents.^[8] Meanwhile, the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya,^[9] framed as a humanitarian mission,^[10] shattered the country’s social fabric, turning it into a battleground for warring militias, human trafficking networks, and foreign mercenaries. The list of interventions is long,^[11] but these examples alone make one thing clear: socialism in the U.S. could mean not just an end to imperialist war, intervention, and economic domination in our homelands, but also the dismantling of Israeli apartheid and the oppressive regional order it upholds.

But imperial violence does not only manifest through war, sanctions, and economic subjugation—it is reinforced through ideological warfare at home. The same system that devastates our homelands relies on a deep-seated culture of vilification and repression to justify its actions and silence dissent. Since 2001, the so-called War on Terror has provided the framework for state-sponsored anti-Arab hysteria, normalizing surveillance, criminalization, and the policing of political expression. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, this repression has intensified—from Biden’s crackdown on Palestine solidarity to the unprecedented escalation of hate we now see, a trajectory that reached new heights under Trump and continues unabated. As Mahmoud Khalil told us from behind bars, this surge is part of “a broader strategy to suppress dissent.”^[12] In the face of this repression, socialism is necessary in the US, as it is the only way to genuinely safeguard freedom of speech, thought, and expression—something the ruling political establishment, rotten to its core across both parties, claims to uphold while systematically dismantling.

Viewpoint from Canada

After five years of navigating Canada’s immigration system, I am finally on track to becoming a citizen—provided the laws don’t change. But with Trump’s return and Canada heading toward a likely Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre, the political landscape is shifting. In October 2024, the Liberal Party announced plans to slash immigration in a bid to neutralize Conservative gains,^[13] a move reminiscent of how Biden and Harris hardened their stance on migration ahead of the U.S. election. This is part of a broader pattern: the failures of liberal governance in addressing structural crises have paved the way for right-wing populism across the West.

Poilievre, projected to be Canada’s next prime minister, has capitalized on these failures, channeling working-class frustrations over housing, inflation, and economic precarity into the same anti-immigrant, anti-“woke,” pro-corporate rhetoric that has defined the ascendant global right. Meanwhile, liberals cling to the status quo, refusing to address the systemic rot even as it collapses beneath them. And the holes they dig are ours to fall into, for they’ve all amassed their properties and assets and left the rest of us scrambling to find well-paying and fulfilling jobs, affordable housing, and prospects of a dignified future.

Trump’s return emboldens Poilievre and his supporters, but mimicking Trumpism offers no immunity from the contradictions of capitalist relations. Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on Canadian exports will have far-reaching consequences for the Canadian political economy,^[14] given its deep dependency on trade with the U.S. Exports account for about one-third of Canada’s GDP, with 75% of those bound for the U.S. Key exports like oil and gas, lumber, metals and minerals, and automobiles are especially vulnerable to disruption.

It is therefore unsurprising that these tariff threats have galvanized a political crisis in Canada.^[15] We witnessed Trudeau pushing for a united provincial front to retaliate against American trade aggression, while Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith outright rejected a “Team Canada” approach, refusing to jeopardize the petro-province. Alberta’s dependence on fossil fuel exports puts it at odds with any broader attempt to align Canadian economic interests against American pressure. This moment highlights a key contradiction in Canada’s political economy: the competing forces of resource-driven provincial nationalism and federal cohesion, where the economic interests of a fossil fuel-dependent province stand at odds with broader national strategies.

Yet an even deeper contradiction lies at the heart of Canadian nationalism itself. It is hollow, incapable of escaping its colonial foundations. The more the political class lays claim to land, the more it underscores the reality of its theft from Indigenous peoples. Canada’s major export commodities—oil, gas, minerals, and lumber—are extracted through pipelines, mines, and roads that desecrate Indigenous lands and ecosystems. Smith’s position reflects more than just Alberta’s economic dependence on fossil fuels; it reveals the larger conflict between extractive capital, environmental justice, and Indigenous sovereignty.

The Trudeau government, far from addressing this dependency, has only deepened it. Instead of advancing a just transition, it spent C$34 billion on the Trans Mountain Pipeline,^[16] tripling oil flows from Alberta to the Pacific while trampling Indigenous land rights and violently suppressing indigenous resistance.^[17] Despite these favors, Trudeau failed to win over Alberta’s working class—when the pipeline officially opened in May 2024, it was Smith, not Trudeau, who took credit.^[18]

This political crisis reflects a broader disillusionment with liberal governance, pushing much of the working class to the right. The Trudeau government’s repeated use of back-to-work orders to crush striking rail,^[19] port,^[20] and postal workers only accelerates this shift.^[21] And if, hypothetically, a socialist alternative were to emerge in Canada, it would immediately face economic retaliation.

Why?

Socialist policies like wealth redistribution, nationalization, or stronger labor protections would likely provoke immediate capital flight as corporations and investors relocate to the U.S. to avoid regulation or taxation. Case in point is Amazon’s most recent decision to shut down all its activities in Quebec in what seems to be a retaliation to a unionization effort in one of its warehouses.^[22]

Canada’s export dependency makes it highly vulnerable to economic coercion, as Trump’s tariff threats already demonstrate. These tariffs are explicitly tied to Canada’s adoption of his war on drugs and migrants—showing how easily the U.S. leverages trade to enforce its agenda. Now, imagine the scale of retaliation if a socialist movement were to gain traction here. This is precisely why socialism in the U.S. is not just desirable—it is necessary.

Viewpoint as an Internationalist

Trump’s reemergence is not an isolated event—it represents the culmination of decades of unmasking the structures of American empire, with power structures at home and abroad consistently upheld across administrations. At the same time, there is a unique urgency in examining this pivotal moment, as Biden’s departure and Trump’s return reveal a critical juncture in the trajectory of American (and therefore global) politics.

What sets Trump apart is the overt collapse of liberalism and the normalization of fascism. He is not the first to claim “law and order” or launch campaigns targeting racialized and feminized others.^[23] Nor is he the first to assist settlers’ encroachment on the West Bank, call for Gaza’s ethnic cleansing, or chant “Drill, baby, drill!” and “Make America Great Again.” But it’s the particular way in which he emboldens and empowers the abandonment of a brief chapter in modern history in which Western nation-states at least pretended to care about justice.

Just days prior to commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the red army, Trump’s newly appointed propagandist Elon Musk appears through a giant screen at a far-right rally in Germany,^[24] urging the crowd to shed their guilt and embrace German nationalism. Alice Weidel, who leads Germany’s far-right AfD party overtly parrots Trump’s rhetoric:^[25] immigrants out, the nuclear family as the only valid form of love, and the ghost of “woke socialism” fueling lies about climate change. Even Weidel’s “common sense” policies echo Trump’s “revolution of common sense.” Gramsci rolls in his grave, and we are left wishing for a Cemetery Notebooks to chronicle the death of liberal democracy.

Surely, right-wing populists worldwide, from Milei to Modi, Orbán to Meloni are all relishing Trump's return. But Germany, given its particular history of Nazism and its recent role in the genocide in Gaza,^[26] warrants special attention. The demise of the Social Democratic Party and Green Party in Germany, who were leading a coalition with a neoliberal pro-deregulation party, is mired with the same features of the demise of neo/liberalism in the rest of the West–hollow reforms, funding and arming genocide, and essentially rolling out a red carpet for the much-expected rise of the right.

Germany, 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, could embark on a mass deportation program under the leadership of a group that uses the slogan “Alice für Deutschland” as a play on words on the Nazi slogan “Alles für Deutschland.” This is our current juncture.

It becomes clearer and clearer, then, that what we truly need is a socialist international–a world in which the U.S. exports abolitionist frameworks, climate justice, and anti-imperialist solidarity instead of drones, sanctions, and surveillance technologies. Grassroots movements in the U.S. already understand this—and they are the ones who hold the key to a radically different future. Our task from the outside is to support them. Palestine has shown how intersectional movements can converge, building solidarity across struggles. And nothing proves the power of this solidarity more than efforts to fracture it and break it apart through funding cuts, deportation threats, and smears against anyone who opposes Israeli apartheid.

Transnational solidarity must extend to every victim of American empire. We must stand with those deported from the U.S., with Palestinians returning to rubble in Gaza and enduring campaigns of violent dispossession in the West Bank, with Black and Indigenous communities resisting state violence and environmental racism, with Syrians facing deportation in Germany while their homeland remains in an ambiguous state between destruction and reconstruction.

It appears as an insurmountable challenge to do all that in one same breath, but part of strategizing is to make confronting the challenge easier.