Analysis

Three Frontiers of Global China

What defines Global China today? China’s global power extends beyond infrastructural investments in the global South to entail normative and epistemic shifts as well, with China promoting new standards of global governance and regimes of knowledge as an alternative to the Western system.

Arms Markets

The US is far and away the world’s largest military spender, military producer, and arms exporter, accounting for more than a third of global military expenditure and 42 percent of all exports, surpassing one trillion dollars in 2024. Yet the global military economy is also populated by other actors who can influence the number and variety of weapons that are produced, bought, sold, and used on the battlefield.

Histories of Decline

American elites have raised the question of US decline periodically for most of the last sixty years. What can we learn from this march of failed predictions? Will the doomsayers always be wrong? Or just early? 

Introduction

The Editors introduce PW Issue 1: American Power

The Dollar’s Dominance

Is de-dollarization on the horizon? One of the mainstays of the global order for the past seventy years has been American economic leadership and the use of the US dollar as the core means of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. While the eruption of war and trade instability threaten the endurance of US hegemony, a currency transition seems unlikely to place.

Monroe Doctrines

The “Donroe Doctrine” is the latest iteration of long-standing claims to regional domination in the absence of hegemony—an exaggerated reformulation of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny.

Bolivarian Twilight

After the US invasion of Venezuela, acting President Delcy Rodríguez was named as a “friend” and ”partner” of the Trump administration. Why has Rodríguez managed to remain in office after the kidnapping of Maduro—her former boss and ally? The answer can be found in the trajectory of Venezuela politics since the Bolivarian Revolution and the cracks in an inter-bourgeois agreement under Madurismo.

Socialism Under Siege

In January of 2026, the Trump administration imposed a total blockade of oil shipments to Cuba, plunging its oil-dependent electricity grid into chaos. The administration’s economic war marks the latest in a long line of attempts to strangle the country and topple its Revolutionary government.

After Brent

The UK’s North Sea is one of the most mature and explored hydrocarbon basins on earth. Production peaked around the turn of the new millennium at 4.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, falling to around 1.4 million barrels a day in 2023—a decrease of 69 percent.

Unstitching America

No private company is logistically capable of delivering the mail. So what does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

Soy Republics

The region's role as a key soy exporter has empowered reactionary politics and fuelled ecological resistance, in the biome and beyond.

Producing Scarcity

The US siege of Venezuela has crippled the country's financial system. What are the preconditions for its recovery?

Home Depot’s New Last Mile

Home Depot has been on a building and acquisitions spree, rapidly taking over a half-dozen logistics companies. Is it also creating an opportunity for organized labor?

Rupture, What Rupture?

Mark Carney’s speech at Davos has got the international community talking about rupture; but his value-based realism is a thinly veiled attempt to salvage a neoliberal international order with Canadian characteristics.

Fiscal Democracy

Lula’s overhaul of the tax system represents a challenge to the Brazilian oligarchy which goes beyond the distributive policies of previous PT governments.

Pinto’s Lesson

Reconciling cepalino and dependency theory, Aníbal Pinto developed a powerful framework for understanding the internal fractures in the working class.

War and Succession

The appointment of Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei reflects the shifting balance of power in wartime Iran.

The Venezuela Illusion

Iran’s security structure ensures that the US will struggle to contain the dynamic of military escalation or determine its political outcomes.

Hezbollah’s Gamble

The party's decision to reengage the Israeli army is a strategic reorientation after the bruising defeat of 2024.