Roma, Italia
Introduction
Over the past decade, and with increasing intensity in recent years, the United States has resorted to military force across a wide range of theatres, including the Middle East, the wider Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and parts of Latin America. These interventions have generally been justified through recurring narratives such as counterterrorism, regional stability, freedom of navigation, and the defence of democratic norms.
Although each of these explanations carries a degree of plausibility, taken individually they struggle to account for the broader coherence of U.S. behaviour across geographically and politically diverse contexts. For instance, U.S. naval deployments in the Red Sea following attacks on commercial shipping in 2023–2024, continued military operations in Syria and Iraq, and renewed diplomatic and economic pressure in Venezuela appear connected only loosely if analysed through purely regional security frameworks. This paper advances an alternative interpretive framework: recent U.S. military actions can be better understood as moments within a systemic economic competition with China, unfolding against the backdrop of a structural crisis of global capitalist integration.
From this perspective, the use of force does not represent a departure from economic rationality. Rather, it appears as one of the instruments through which economic orders are stabilised when market-based mechanisms alone prove insufficient. Energy considerations, domestic political constraints, and regional security concerns remain relevant, but they function primarily as conditioning factors, shaping the timing and form of intervention rather than determining its strategic direction.
1. Systemic Competition and the Crisis of Global Economic Integration
Over the past fifteen years China has evolved from a manufacturing hub deeply embedded in Western-centred global value chains into a systemic economic pole with increasing autonomy in production, finance, technology, and infrastructure. This transformation has progressively strained the configuration of the global economy that emerged in the post–Cold War period.
International institutions increasingly describe this process using cautious terminology such as geo-economic fragmentation, re-shoring, or friend-shoring. Beneath this technical language, however, lies a more fundamental difficulty: the growing challenge of sustaining a single integrated space of accumulation governed by shared rules.
In this context, U.S.–China competition exceeds the boundaries of traditional geopolitical rivalry. It reflects a progressive incompatibility between models of capitalist integration. On one side stands an order centred on the U.S. dollar, liberalised financial markets, and globally dispersed production networks. On the other stands a model characterised by strong state coordination, strategic control over infrastructure, and partial insulation from Western financial jurisdiction.
This tension is structural rather than episodic and constitutes a key explanatory factor for the re-emergence of coercive instruments in international economic governance.
2. Capitalist Accumulation and Contemporary Conflict
The structural nature of this competition can be clarified by returning to classical political economy, particularly to the analysis of competitive accumulation and systemic crisis developed by Karl Marx. In Marx’s framework, capitalist accumulation is inherently expansive and competitive; crises emerge not as external shocks but as endogenous outcomes of overaccumulation, declining profitability, and intensified rivalry among capitals.
Although developed in a different historical context, these structural insights retain analytical relevance. Competitive accumulation, when no longer stabilised through expanding markets or institutional integration, generates pressures that exceed the regulatory capacity of purely economic mechanisms.
This line of reasoning has been reformulated in contemporary terms by Emiliano Brancaccio. His concept of the “war of capitalism” interprets modern conflict as an expression of inter-capitalist competition under conditions of global fragmentation. According to this perspective, the breakdown of convergence mechanisms—particularly in wages, productivity, and profit rates—favours the formation of economic blocs and increases the likelihood of coercive strategies aimed at preserving relative positions within the global hierarchy.
Within this framework, the use of force is neither inevitable nor purely ideological. Rather, it appears as a contingent but recurrent mechanism of regulation that emerges when capitalist competition can no longer be governed through market integration alone.
3. Infrastructure, Trade Routes, and the Geography of Accumulation
One domain in which systemic competition becomes materially visible is that of infrastructure and trade routes. China’s Belt and Road Initiative can be interpreted, beyond ideological narratives, as an attempt to reduce logistical vulnerabilities and to secure more autonomous channels for trade, finance, and investment.
From this perspective, regions such as the Red Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean, and major maritime chokepoints assume importance not merely as regional flashpoints but as strategic nodes within the geography of global accumulation. Disruptions in these areas affect transportation costs, insurance premiums, supply-chain reliability, and ultimately macroeconomic stability.
Recent events illustrate this dynamic. The escalation of attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea during 2023–2024, and the subsequent U.S.-led naval operations aimed at protecting shipping routes, occurred along one of the most important corridors connecting Asian manufacturing centres with European markets through the Suez Canal. The economic significance of this route, through which roughly 10–12 percent of global trade passes, highlights how maritime security becomes directly linked to the stability of global production and trade networks.
Military actions framed as the defence of freedom of navigation can therefore be interpreted as measures aimed at safeguarding trade. Within a systemic framework, however, they also function to preserve an existing mode of infrastructure governance closely aligned with the prevailing international economic order.
4. Monetary Power, Financial Networks, and Coercion
Another central dimension of systemic competition concerns the international monetary and financial system. The dominant role of the U.S. dollar allows the United States to exercise influence through sanctions, payment controls, and regulatory reach across global financial networks.
China’s efforts to diversify reserves, promote alternative settlement mechanisms, and reduce exposure to U.S. financial jurisdiction represent attempts to mitigate this structural vulnerability. Examples include the expansion of renminbi-based trade settlement mechanisms, bilateral currency swap agreements with emerging economies, and experiments with cross-border payment systems such as the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which partially reduces reliance on Western-dominated financial infrastructures.
Analyses by institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund suggest that the expansion of such alternatives could increase transaction costs and weaken the efficiency of the existing global financial system.
Within this context, military power functions less as a substitute for economic authority than as its ultimate guarantor, reinforcing the credibility of the rules and institutions that sustain the current monetary order.
5. South America and the Logic of Economic Realignment
Beyond Eurasia and maritime chokepoints, South America has emerged as a secondary but strategically significant arena of systemic competition. In this region the objective is not territorial control but the reconfiguration of economic presence, investment flows, and financial dependence.
China’s growing involvement in infrastructure finance, energy, mining, and currency arrangements has the potential to weaken traditional mechanisms of Western economic influence. Over the last two decades, China has become one of the principal trading partners for several South American economies, including Brazil, Chile, and Peru, while Chinese policy banks have financed large-scale infrastructure and energy projects across the region.
From a systemic perspective, U.S. initiatives in the region can therefore be interpreted as attempts to limit the consolidation of alternative economic networks rather than as ad hoc responses to domestic political developments.
The case of Venezuela illustrates this logic particularly clearly. Beyond its energy resources, the country represents a node in the broader contest over economic alignment. Policies combining pressure, selective sanctions relief, and conditional engagement suggest attempts to reintermediate economic flows within regulated financial and institutional channels consistent with a broader strategy of managed reintegration under conditions of fragmentation.
6. Conditioning Factors: Energy, Domestic Politics, and Security
Energy dynamics, domestic political constraints, and regional security concerns continue to shape U.S. policy choices. Inflationary pressures, alliance commitments, and electoral cycles influence the timing and intensity of interventions as well as their public justification.
Nevertheless, these factors alone cannot explain the coherence of U.S. actions across multiple theatres. They are better understood as conditioning variables operating within a broader strategic framework defined by systemic economic competition.
Conclusion
Taken together, recent U.S. military actions appear less as isolated responses to contingent crises and more as components of a broader strategy aimed at managing a transforming global economic order.
Competition with China—understood not primarily as an ideological confrontation but as a structural challenge between models of capitalist accumulation—provides a unifying framework capable of integrating military, financial, and infrastructural dimensions.
Classical political economy, as developed by Marx and reformulated by Brancaccio, helps explain why under conditions of fragmentation coercion tends to re-emerge as a mechanism of regulation. At the same time, analyses produced by international institutions such as the IMF, BIS, and UNCTAD increasingly point toward a similar diagnosis: the growing difficulty of governing global capitalism through market-based mechanisms alone.
In this context, the reappearance of military force should not be interpreted as a relic of a pre-globalised past, but rather as a symptom of the systemic tensions embedded in the current phase of global capitalist competition.
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Autore dell’articolo: Filippo Adinolfi, laureato in Economia Politica presso l’Università La Sapienza di Roma
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