Donald Trump just confirmed all my geopolitical analysis on the nature of the modern transatlantic empire. Just read this excerpt:
Reporter: "To what extent are Americans' financial situations motivating you to make a deal?"
President Trump: "Not even a little bit…I don't think about Americans' financial situations."
We need to understand that modern empires have evolved so much that it would be aggressively misleading and false to define them as just a single country. An empire is a conglomerate of mega-corporations that may or may not be headquartered in the country hosting the empire. For example, I consider Samsung an integral part of the U.S. empire, even though it is a South Korean company.
These mega-corporations attach to their host nations like a virus and cannibalize the host nation's financial and military infrastructures to exert ultra-capitalistic dominance across the globe.
This modern transatlantic empire rests on four pillars.
The first pillar is raw military power. Mega-corporations need continuous access to cheap raw materials like lithium from South America, cobalt and uranium from Africa, and oil from the Middle East.
The U.S. maintains approximately 850 recognized military installations across more than 80 sovereign countries, and these bases are the private security arm of this modern transatlantic empire.
They ensure that whoever is in power locally keeps the mines and oil wells open to foreign corporate ownership. If a sovereign nation decides to nationalize its resources by taking its oil back from ExxonMobil to fund its own citizens' welfare, the mega-corporations view this as theft. These military bases also serve as a deterrent and a warning signal. They tell these countries that if they kick out the mega-corporations, the empire has the logistical capability to fund an insurgency, enact a regime change using their paramilitary NGO groups, or launch a full-scale military invasion within 48 hours.
The second pillar is the U.S. Navy, which serves as the logistical protection force for these mega-corporations.
The mega-corporations of today, like Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and Walmart, rely entirely on "just-in-time" global manufacturing.
For example, even though the iPhone is designed in the USA, the A-series microchips are manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, the OLED display panels are predominantly manufactured by Samsung and LG in South Korea and BOE in China. The highly advanced camera lenses and image sensors are primarily manufactured by Sony in Japan, the flash memory chips are outsourced from Japan and South Korea, the aluminum and titanium used for the casing are sourced from countries like Canada and Australia, and the rare earth minerals needed for the magnets, speakers, and vibration motors are heavily mined and processed in China, Vietnam, and Africa.
Once all these high-tech pieces are manufactured, they are shipped to massive mega-factories to be screwed, glued, and soldered together by human hands in China. Because these mega-corporations must ship components across five different oceans to make their outsourced model work, they require a global police force to guard the trade routes, and this is where the U.S. Navy comes in.
Its primary job is to patrol the global "chokepoints" like the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Suez Canal region.
The U.S. Navy ensures that no regional power (like Iran, China, or Yemen) can block a shipping lane, impose transit taxes, or disrupt the massive cargo ships carrying the conglomerate's goods.
The Navy effectively subsidizes global corporations by providing them with free, invincible shipping insurance.
The third pillar is the boardroom terror groups like the IMF and World Bank.
These are economic hitmen, and their primary assignment is to force indebted nations to dismantle their sovereignty. When a country is on the brink of bankruptcy, the IMF steps in and offers a bailout loan. But the loan comes with extreme conditions called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs).
To get the money to avoid starvation or state collapse, the country must agree to the IMF's demands.
The IMF demands the country sell off its publicly owned assets to pay the debt. The state water company, the power grid, the telecommunications network, and the national airline are auctioned off for pennies on the dollar. Who buys them? The same mega-corporations that make up the modern transatlantic empire.
The IMF also forces the indebted country to eliminate environmental protections, cut minimum wages, crush labor unions, and slash corporate taxes. They also force countries to cut funding for public healthcare and education to redirect that money to debt repayment for Wall Street banks that are still part of the empire.
The fourth pillar of this modern empire is the cultural pillar that spreads the gospel of global consumerism.
Understand that no empire in human history has ever survived on pure military force and economic extortion alone. To truly rule, an empire needs "soft power", an ideology or a religion that makes the subjects want to be part of the system.
In this transnational corporate empire, that "religion" is global consumerism, and its church is Hollywood, Western media, and Big Tech algorithms on social media platforms.
Why does a teenage boy in Anambra or a factory worker in Vietnam desperately want a $1,200 Apple iPhone when a $100 generic phone does the exact same basic tasks? Because the media pillar has done its job and has trained the global population to view themselves not as citizens, workers, or communities, but as consumers.
If you want to be viewed as modern, wealthy, and relevant, you must buy the iPhone, wear Nike shoes, and drink Coca-Cola.
The media creates an artificial, insatiable psychological void that can only be filled by buying the products that the empire’s supply chain produces.
These corporations funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Hollywood to make movies like Top Gun, Transformers, or Iron Man to portray the "enforcers" of the empire (the American military) not as guards for corporate shipping lanes, but as heroic defenders of "global freedom."
The media also sanitizes the corporate oligarchs and CEOs as well. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg are packaged not as ruthless monopolists, but as "visionary geniuses" and "philanthropists" saving the world and "connecting people together."
This media apparatus also teaches the global public that the highest form of human achievement is to get a job at a mega-corporation, earn capital, and spend it on the conglomerate's goods. Because the media makes people enjoy consuming, they don't feel like subjects of an empire; they feel like free, active participants.
So, in essence, Trump is right when he said he does not think about Americans' financial situations in whatever foreign wars the U.S. military has to fight to secure supply chains and no-bid contracts for these mega-corporations.
This also confirms my previous analysis that even Americans and the rest of Europe are also victims of these mega-corporations just like the rest of us in the Global South.
The mega-corporations that make up this transatlantic empire have absolutely no loyalty to the American flag, the British Crown, or the Western working class. Capital has no borders.
In this system, the Global South is exploited for its cheap labor and raw materials, while the citizens of the Global North are exploited for their tax dollars and consumer debt.
Reporter: "To what extent are Americans' financial situations motivating you to make a deal?"
President Trump: "Not even a little bit…I don't think about Americans' financial situations."