Ricardo López Risso | Peruvian Communist Party
Vladimir Lenin argued that imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under monopoly capitalism. This perspective remains valid and highly significant in our understanding of U.S. imperialism and its European acolytes today.
Donald Trump’s second arrival at the White House has meant a substantial shift in the danger of an open Third World War, whose central pretext is to guarantee “permanent peace.”
The year 2024 was marked by the preparation of global imperialist forces for launching a worldwide offensive against countries and companies that undermine their sovereignty: the imperialism of transnational corporations, which shed their corporate masks to make decisions about humanity according to their insatiable hunger for profit margins.
In 2024, a multipolar world was emerging, along with the establishment of new systems of relations among states based on sovereignty, mutual respect, and multilateral benefit. Also anticipated was the reappearance of global politics from the perspective of intensifying the commercial-tariff war initiated during Trump’s first term and continued by Biden, in the context of an internal struggle against national debt, which by June 2025 reached $36,219,196,981,680. However, this outlook proved too narrow. Trump, who represents the real productive forces of North American monopoly capitalism, burst onto the global economic scene by attacking the very foundation of inter-state relations: the economy. Trump has made it clear that he is the spearhead of the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie (oligarchy), which is attempting to reconstitute itself after a sustained loss of profits both in its own market and in global markets.
The U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie is the oligarchy of arms and war: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman (owned by State Street Corporation, Capital Group Companies, The Vanguard Group, and BlackRock), General Dynamics, and Boeing (owned by The Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price, Newport Trust, and BlackRock) attempt to manage their own inherent contradictions. On the one hand, the encouragement of wars—regardless of imperialist “justification”—has only allowed sustained profit growth in two productive sectors over the past 15 years: the military-industrial complex and the financial complex, as seen in the rise of the investment fund “BlackRock” (traded through the iShares US Aerospace and Defense fund) in war scenarios such as Ukraine. For this North American imperialist bourgeoisie (and, to a lesser degree, its French, German, and British counterparts), instigating conflicts of any scale anywhere in the world is a business in which losses are measured in lives, gains in dollars, and the export of fungible capital (weapons) is transformed into fixed assets such as land, oil fields, rare earth mines (like the U.S.-Ukraine agreement trading rare earths for weapons debt), ports, and more.
For example, one of the largest weapons and fighter aircraft manufacturers, Lockheed Martin, in 2024 reported net profits of $5.336 billion, with total sales reaching $71 billion in combat aircraft, helicopters, and missiles.
Meanwhile, RTX Corporation (a missile manufacturer) improved its profit projections compared to the years 2021 to 2024: in 2021 it earned $3.86 billion, in 2023 $3.2 billion, in 2024 $4.77 billion, and by January 2025 it had reached $8.23 billion in profits.
Northrop Grumman Corporation, an aerospace and defense technology company, significantly increased its revenue between 2017 and 2020, from $26 billion to $37 billion. In 2023, the company’s revenue exceeded $39 billion, driven by the war in Ukraine, as shown in the following graph:
In 2023, U.S. defense spending represented 3.36% of GDP, according to Datosmacro.com. In 2022, the United States spent $837 billion on defense, which amounted to 39% of total global military expenditure, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
In 2024, U.S. defense spending represented nearly 40% of global military expenditures, reaching $997 billion—more than the combined defense budgets of the next nine countries. In comparison, China, the second-largest defense spender, allocated $314 billion in 2024. Similarly, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation reported that the U.S. dedicated $916 billion to defense—surpassing the combined $883 billion spent by the next nine countries.
Beyond observing the size of the profits in the Military-Industrial Complex, the scale of sales, and the movement of capital from the financial sector, we can accurately identify the fusion of military-industrial capital with financial capital, and the existence of a Military-Industrial-Financial Complex, which has been consolidated for many years. This reflects the capitalist phenomenon of “financialization,” meaning the growing interrelation and interdependence of financial interests, markets, agents, and institutions in the functioning of national and international economies.
It must be made crystal clear that for the oligarchies of the U.S. and Europe, wars are simply business—where profits are always guaranteed.
Trump’s campaign rhetoric about ending the wars in which the U.S. is involved did not mean withdrawing from war scenarios, but rather winning them—or starting new ones to win conflicts they themselves created. Thus, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have not ended; on the contrary, U.S. involvement has intensified. It forced Ukraine to yield the exploitation of rare earth deposits, most of which are under Russian control. It committed to Netanyahu to expel Gazans from their lands in order to build luxury resorts. Today, preparations are underway with Israel’s Zionist regime for an all-out war against the Islamic Republic of Iran—not just to prevent the country from developing nuclear weapons, but to stop it from developing any form of peaceful nuclear technology.
Lima, June 2025