Dominance and Disorder
I've been corresponding with folks from the AGAPE research group about how the Trump administration’s production of global instability actually makes sense for the U.S., given its push to maintain hegemony within Empire. Basically, the Trump crew was the faction of the U.S. ruling class that wanted to openly own and accelerate this strategy in a loud, spectacular way. Meanwhile, the other faction preferred to play it cool—same strategy, but with enough subtlety and disguise to maintain plausible deniability and keep up the facade of being "guardians of international order."
Off those conversations, I've reworked and remixed some existing material with new insights from the correspondence into the dispatch below, which I'm sharing as a counter to recent coverage on events ranging from the AI arms race, to the cutting off of US aid, to tariffs and looming trade wars. It situates U.S.-China competition as a central dynamic in Empire’s mutation, urging critical inquiry into how local and global forms of resistance can exploit and disrupt the fractures within this evolving system.
China’s Resurgence and U.S. Sabotage in Empire’s Evolution
Li Lihong, Apple China, 2007
The intensifying rivalry between the United States and China reflects a deeper struggle within Empire, a global system of domination that transcends any single nation. To understand this moment, it is crucial to distinguish between Empire and the empires that compete within it. Particular empires such as the Spanish, British, and U.S. empires have historically sought dominance through military, economic, and technological expansion, vying for control over resources, markets, and populations. Yet no empire, however powerful, fully defines or controls the global system.
Empire (with a capital E) refers to a broader, enduring system of extraction, production, circulation, and control that adapts even as individual empires rise and fall. Operating on a planetary scale, Empire is exemplified by the technosphere—the artificial, human-dominated subsystem of Earth. It survives by parasitizing critical life systems such as defense, metabolism, circulation, and now sensation. Each hegemon reconfigures Empire’s infrastructure to maintain control, embedding its mechanisms ever more deeply into social, economic, and technological life. The current rivalry between the U.S. and China is a contest to reshape Empire’s infrastructure in the era of surveillance capitalism, where control over global logistics, digital infrastructure, data flows, and increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI) is central to maintaining hegemony.
Historically, Empire has reorganized its methods of extraction and control to maintain global dominance. In its earliest phase, Empire relied on conquest and plunder. Genoese financiers, Iberian aristocrats, and Papal administrators coordinated an economy driven by territorial expansion, with the conquest of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade depleting Indigenous societies of resources and labor. Wealth was extracted through forced labor, monopolized trade routes, and resource exploitation, anchoring Empire in a logic of violent expansion. By the seventeenth century, the Dutch empire refined these operations by militarizing and corporatizing commerce through the Dutch East India Company, the world’s first multinational corporation. However, prolonged wars with Britain and France eventually undermined Dutch dominance as other empires adopted and expanded upon similar models of state-backed trade monopolies.
The nineteenth century saw Empire transition to industrial capitalism under British hegemony. Colonies were reorganized to supply raw materials and absorb industrial waste, creating a global metabolic system that fueled Britain’s economic growth. Industrial production and imperial logistics became Empire’s backbone, accelerating the extraction and transformation of life systems. By the early twentieth century, the U.S. ascended to hegemonic power by internalizing control over global logistics. Unlike its German rivals, who, lacking an expansive overseas empire, were forced to pursue aggressive military expansion on the European continent and were ultimately defeated in two world wars, the U.S. leveraged its vast settler-colonial empire to build an extensive infrastructure integrating North America and linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Historian Gareth Stedman Jones observes, “Historians who speak complacently of the absence of the [overseas imperialism] characteristic of European powers merely conceal the fact that the whole internal history of U.S. imperialism was one vast process of territorial seizure and occupation. The absence of territorialism ‘abroad’ was founded on an unprecedented territorialism ‘at home.’”
After World War II, the U.S. absorbed the remnants of the Nazi German Empire in the Euro-Atlantic and the Japanese Empire in the Asia-Pacific, redefining Empire as a circulatory system centered on itself, sustained by ports, shipping lanes, transnational financial institutions, and, more recently, digital and AI infrastructures. This system facilitated the seamless movement of capital, goods, and labor between the Euro-Atlantic and Asia-Pacific, while concealing the coercive foundations of global capitalism.
Today, Empire exerts control through surveillance capitalism. Digital platforms and data infrastructures have become Empire’s sensory organs, capturing and commodifying human perception, attention, and behavior. Sensation itself has been transformed into a resource to be extracted and monetized. Artificial intelligence systems increasingly serve as both accelerators of extraction and tools for prediction and control, enabling Empire to monitor populations, shape behavior, and optimize logistical flows on an unprecedented scale. The competition between the U.S. and China now revolves around control over these global surveillance, AI, and logistics systems. Both powers seek to dominate the infrastructures that sustain Empire, with digital networks and data flows emerging as key arenas of hegemonic power.
The current crisis of Empire arises from China’s resurgence after centuries of subjugation under Euro-Atlantic dominance. While the U.S. successfully integrated smaller East Asian client states—Japan and the jewels of its erstwhile empire, South Korea and Taiwan—into its global capitalist system on terms favorable to U.S. hegemony, it faces a more existential challenge with China: a territorially vast, militarily independent nation encompassing nearly a fifth of the world’s population. The U.S. had attempted to incorporate China as “the world’s factory,” extracting surplus value from its labor force while circumventing the racial and political anxieties tied to mass migration. Containerized logistics, just-in-time production, and extraterritorial Special Economic Zones—reminiscent of 19th-century treaty port concessions—were central to this strategy. Yet this gambit, rooted in racist assumptions forged during the 19th-century coolie trade, opium wars, and scramble for treaty port concessions, has backfired. China not only absorbed the mechanisms of global capitalism but also leveraged them to emerge as a formidable rival, shifting economic gravity from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific.
Despite their strategic differences, both the U.S. and China share the goal of controlling Empire’s infrastructure. In the U.S., corporations like Google, Amazon, and Meta seek to monopolize digital and AI platforms. These companies promote the illusion of consumer freedom, offering personalized services that mask their control over behavior and markets. By embedding surveillance into everyday life, they consolidate power within a few profit-driven conglomerates. This privatized governance model hides systemic control beneath the appearance of decentralized innovation and democratic empowerment.
China, by contrast, integrates digital and AI platforms into a centralized, state-led system of governance. Platforms like WeChat and Alibaba align with national objectives, serving as tools for both economic development and political oversight. Digital surveillance technologies are presented as instruments of social stability, reinforcing accountability through mechanisms such as the Social Credit System. Through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China exports its infrastructure and digital networks to partner states, positioning itself as a custodian of collective well-being. Beneath this narrative of benevolent paternalism lies a deeply embedded system of surveillance and behavior regulation.
Both powers operate within Empire’s overarching logic of extraction and control, particularly in the Global South. Infrastructure development, digital expansion, and the advancing implementation of AI-driven governance in these regions are poised to exacerbate resource conflicts and ecological degradation. AI technologies, often promoted as tools for development and efficiency, risk deepening surveillance regimes and automating control over labor and resource management. Whether under the guise of free enterprise and consumer autonomy or benevolent, paternalistic state authority, both systems reinforce Empire’s capacity to entrench global domination and perpetuate exploitative power structures.
To achieve hegemony, China seeks to construct an alternative infrastructure that rivals the U.S.-dominated system. This effort has two core components. First, China aims to realign global trade and resource flows by building a Chinese-centered logistical network through the BRI, connecting regions across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America with railways, ports, and pipelines. Second, China is developing a “stack” of platforms, telecommunications networks, cloud services, and AI technologies to reduce reliance on and outcompete U.S. technology. Platforms such as TikTok and Huawei’s 5G infrastructure serve as cornerstones of this system, which China promotes through investment and soft power.
However, China cannot pursue hegemony through direct military confrontation with the U.S. or the outright destruction of U.S.-centered infrastructure. Instead, by subversively working within this infrastructure, China positions itself as a partner to nations disillusioned with U.S. imperialism. Through strategic investments in physical infrastructure—such as railways, ports, and telecommunications—and in digital and AI infrastructures, China presents an alternative path to development that appears less reliant on military coercion. AI-driven platforms, data-sharing agreements, and technology transfers have become key tools in this strategy, enhancing China’s influence over emerging technological ecosystems. Many nations in the Global South have welcomed this approach, viewing Chinese investment as a counterbalance to U.S. dominance in both traditional and digital infrastructures. However, these nations are increasingly finding themselves caught in cycles of debt dependency and subject to new forms of exploitation and coercion under Chinese-led projects.
The U.S., recognizing China’s ambitions, has intensified efforts to destabilize key regions where China is making inroads. By fostering economic and political crises in these areas, the U.S. seeks to disrupt China’s initiatives, forcing it to expend resources on stabilizing partner nations. This strategy includes undermining regimes aligned with China through political coups, proxy conflicts, and support for opposition movements. Instability near major Chinese infrastructure projects—such as ports, railways, and pipelines—creates operational risks, compelling China or its trusted allies (such as Russia) to intervene diplomatically or militarily. The U.S. also pressures potential partners to avoid deep integration with Chinese networks through sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and military maneuvers.
As this rivalry escalates, regions critical to China’s BRI—particularly in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East—are becoming contested zones. China faces a strategic dilemma: overcommitting resources risks overextension, while inaction could erode its investments and credibility. Meanwhile, the U.S. exploits these vulnerabilities by engineering disorder, continuing a long-standing imperial tactic of forcing rivals to exhaust themselves in attempts to impose stability.
The Trump administration is emerging as the leading architect of global destabilization. Its erratic and confrontational foreign policy—marked by unilateralism, trade wars, and hostility to multilateral institutions—has spread uncertainty worldwide. This unpredictability serves a strategic purpose: a chaotic world favors the United States by disrupting China’s ability to build a competing infrastructure. Instability will force China to divert resources toward crisis management, slowing its efforts to consolidate alliances and logistical networks. By obstructing China’s initiatives, the U.S. maintains its dominance within Empire’s infrastructure of control.
This strategy is rooted in the structural advantage of an established hegemon. The U.S., as the center of the global system, does not need to innovate or significantly improve its infrastructure to maintain control. It is easier to undermine attempts at building a rival system than to overhaul an entrenched one. Historically, dominant powers have leveraged this advantage to destabilize challengers rather than adapt themselves. Upstart powers, in contrast, must innovate to displace incumbents. If they succeed and defend their innovations, they often rise to global leadership. However, established hegemons, aware of this dynamic, use their centrality to sow disorder and sabotage these efforts before they take root, often co-opting them once the threat has been neutralized.
The Trump administration’s foreign policy reflects this calculated destabilization. Rather than reforming the global system, it seeks to prevent China from creating a parallel network of influence. By provoking crises in regions where China has invested heavily, the U.S. aims to sabotage infrastructure projects and undermine China’s credibility. For the Trump administration, destabilization is not an accident but a deliberate strategy to prolong U.S. hegemony within Empire’s infrastructure of governance. As Empire mutates through this phase of crisis and competition, its balance of power will depend on which nation can more effectively leverage instability to its own advantage.
