Unlike the UK, the US is a huge economy. Unlike the UK, the US, also, has long established trade with its neighbours in Canada, Mexico and Central and South America. So, the US can, within its own borders, do what the Brexiters ridiculously claimed that Britain could do. It can set its own rules, and those that wish to operate within the US, or to export to it, have to accept those rules, including the EU and China. Even so, the US was led to create NAFTA, before Trump blew it up, and was then led to replace it with the MCA. Because Trump sees himself as an old style King or colonial Emperor, rather than as a modern imperialist, he is driven in the same general direction, but using the old, abandoned methods of colonialism, land grabs, militarism and annexation. Its what his vulgar approach to Canada, Greenland/Iceland and so on reflects. No wonder his ideology fits seamlessly with the ethnonationalist/racist, settler-colonial ideology of Zionism.
From the perspective of industrial capital, in the abstract, all of these different rules and regulations are irrational, and an impediment to its free expansion. Its why industrial capitalism, in its first flush, had to get rid of all the multiplicity of rules and regulations of feudalism, and create the nation state. The railways provided another example of it, as they quickly required a standardisation of gauge for the tracks, which, also, meant a standardisation of the locomotives and carriages. It also brought about a standardisation of time without which train timetables would have been meaningless. The Bolsheviks, who had appreciated, all of this, and the scientific management methods of the Taylorists, as one of their first revolutionary changes in production, in the USSR, introduced a comprehensive standardisation of sizes and so on, down to the smallest component of production.
Not only did it make production of each component much cheaper, because they were now produced on a much larger scale, but the industries using those components no longer had to waste time in production, ensuring they had the right size of component, taken from the stock room. It also meant that the actual amount of capital held unproductively as stock was reduced. Without such standardisation, none of the advantages of assembly line production, or of time and motion studies could have been realised. When the US sent a delegation to the USSR in the 1920's, that lesson was quickly observed, and the US, in turn, implemented a similar process of standardisation. The example of the social-democratic/corporatist ideas of Herbert Hoover find a pale reflection in the ideas, as far as they can be discerned, of Andy Burnham. But, it also, shows why, if Brexit was a reactionary, delusional adventure, the growing claims about the benefits of breaking up even the nation state, and return to the divisions of regionalism, each ruled over by their own local Bonaparte, are even more reactionary and delusional.
US imperialism has discovered that, although it remains the dominant industrial capital, in many areas of production, having, as I noted earlier, moved away from the old labour intensive, manufacturing and extractive industries, and into new capital intensive spheres, it is China that now dominates global manufacturing industry, and as with the process of combined and uneven development throughout history, it is China and India that are rapidly developing in those areas of high-tech industries into which US industrial capital previously shifted. The rise of China as the global manufacturing superpower, over the last 40 years, had other consequences. It is that manufacturing industry that absorbs huge amounts of raw materials, and China developed global trading relations with many countries in South America, Africa, Australia, and the Middle-East that supply it with those raw materials, and primary products.
At a time when US imperialism was more concerned to have Dollars flowing back to the US to buy up financial assets, so as to keep its asset price bubbles inflating, Chinese imperialism, was paying for its raw materials, energy supplies and other primary products, by exporting not only vast amounts of cheap manufactured commodities, but also by exporting capital. It set up production in DRC etc., to mine the copper that was then exported to China, and those mines used Chinese machines and so on. Like British imperialism in India, in the 19th century, China invested in the creation of additional infrastructure in these countries, tying them ever closer to Beijing. By contrast, the US offered the opportunity to buy already inflated US financial and property assets, the attraction of which was undermined when that bubble burst in 2008, but being, also, another reason that having built its model around it, US imperialism had to reflate it. Alternatively, US imperialism offered to build luxury hotels and facilities for the global elite, in these, economies as with Dubai, which offer little benefit for the masses in those countries, other than the chance to work as a precarious labourer serving the wishes of that elite.
In Afghanistan, US imperialism exported its troops and weapons, to wreak destruction rather than construction. When it ultimately left, the Taliban simply returned, because, unlike with Britain's involvement in India, US involvement in Afghanistan resulted in no export of capital, no industrial development of the economy, no creation of a modern working-class, as the basis of modernising ideas. Once again, as US imperialism and its subordinates withdrew from Afghanistan, it is China that is establishing those kinds of relations, as it develops trade and investment.
