TRANSACTIONAL IMPERIALISM
The Newest Version Of A Very Old & Very Bad Story

CAFCA is and always have been, an anti-imperialist group. Back when we began, more than 50 years ago, in the 1970s, we campaigned against many of the military and intelligence manifestations of imperialism. As for me personally, in the years before CAFCA (or CAFCINZ, as we started out as) existed, I cut my teeth on fighting military imperialism. But CAFCINZ/CAFCA focused more and more on the economic manifestations of imperialism, and they have been our main focus for decades now. Not that we have entirely ignored the military/intelligence side of it. Check out old 1980s’ Watchdogs² and you’ll find plenty of examples.

CAFCA also has more than a passing interest in current military, intelligence and foreign policy issues. Take Rocket Lab for example – it’s an NZ subsidiary of a US transnational corporation, operating a privately-owned foreign military facility on NZ soil, which is used to aid and abet the US military and spy agencies, not to mention helping Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other wars. CAFCA was among the very earliest groups to call out Rocket Lab.

Dennis Small first wrote about it in Watchdog in 2017, sounding the alarm and putting the boot into the Green Party, which was among those bedazzled by little old New Zealand joining the space race (I’m pleased to say that the Greens have long since seen the error of their ways). But the fact of the matter is that CAFCA has left the military/intelligence side of things to our colleagues in the Anti-Bases Campaign (of which I’m also the Organiser) and its publication, Peace Researcher (of which I’m also the Editor). Call it a division of labour.

Sometimes the military and economic manifestations of imperialism merged again and then CAFCA took notice. For an excellent example, see Bill Rosenberg’s “War Profiteers: Corporate Beneficiaries Of The US War On Iraq”, the lead article in Watchdog 103 (August 2003)³. But, by and large, we left that side of things to others.

We had plenty of economic work to do. Imperialism as a word (but not a reality) fell out of use. However, when I’ve used it during my speeches to the odd Gaza rally since 2023, I’ve noticed people’ ears prick up, particularly younger activists, to whom this was all new. They say if you live long enough, you come back into fashion. So, it has proven to be with imperialism, people’s recognition of it and the growth of a movement against it.

What Has Changed To Bring This About?

As with so many other things, the answer is simple – Donald Trump. How appropriate it is that, in 2026, the US is celebrating the 250^th anniversary of their independence from an empire headed by a mad king (George 111), whilst now headed by a mad president. The late Jeremy Agar, veteran CAFCA Committee member and Watchdog writer, was a Trump obsessive (a not uncommon condition) and regularly wrote about him in these pages for years.

After Jeremy’s death in 2022 I saw no need to continue doing so and have not – until now. I most recently wrote about Trump in Peace Researcher 70 (December 2025; “Masters Of War”)⁴. The other masters of war and imperialism that featured in that article were Putin and Netanyahu. This is what I wrote about Trump:

Fortunately for the world, the current Commander in Chief of the world’s most powerful military has the attention span of Homer Simpson and hasn’t got either the patience or the intelligence to be a real Grade A warmonger. He prides himself on being a deal maker and the adrenaline rush in that is the quick result (and usually a handsome profit). Laughably, he lusts after the Nobel Peace Prize. As a warmonger, he goes for the gesture, not for the agony of a drawn-out war. So, in his first term, he murdered the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and dropped the world’s biggest conventional bomb on Afghanistan – and that was pretty much it.

In this term, he has killed a few unfortunates on Venezuelan speedboats; he has sent the US military to attack Yemen; and, most seriously, allowed himself to be suckered by Netanyahu into joining the unprovoked Israeli bombing of Iran in 2025. Trump would never have the stomach for the protracted war that Putin is, not very successfully, waging in Ukraine.

He was originally elected in 2016 on a promise of no more ‘forever wars’, such as Afghanistan and Iraq (or Vietnam), and he has stuck to that. Indeed, he deserves credit for brokering deals to end more than one war in 2025, such as the flare-up between India and Pakistan. His feeling of kinship with autocrats led to him being the US President who came the closest to actually making a deal with North Korea during his first term (but he didn’t have the patience to continue working on a problem that dates back to World War 2).

But if Trump isn’t actually using war to enforce the interests of the American Empire, he is certainly threatening to, openly, outrageously and menacingly. Evidence – the threat to use force, overt and/or covert against Venezuela; the threat to repossess the Panama Canal; the threat to annex Greenland from America’s NATO ally Denmark; and, most outrageously, the threat to annex Canada, the closest friend, neighbour and ally of the US (tellingly, none of these things has remotely looked like actually happening).

A Naked Imperialist

Actually, I don’t want to think about Donald Trump naked – I’d go blind from all the orange. He is an imperialist from the world of business, not politics or ideology. His imperialism is strictly transactional – unlike Biden he won’t supply weapons and intelligence to Ukraine, he’ll sell them, and demand Ukraine’s stock of rare earth minerals in exchange. He uses tariffs as a crude weapon in place of international trade negotiations and agreements.

Although Trump doesn’t have the stamina or appetite for protracted war, he’s quite happy to provide the wherewithal for others to do so. Exhibit A – Israel’s genocide in Gaza, coupled with its ever expanding mini-imperialism in its neighbourhood and beyond. None of that would be possible without an endless flow of American weapons and the provision of diplomatic cover at international institutions such as the United Nations Security Council.

Trump has taken it to another level by musing about kicking out all the Palestinians from Gaza and turning the wretched place into a resort, no doubt to the profit of his family businesses. In fairness to Trump, all US Presidents, bar none, have provided unconditional support for Israel and armed it to the teeth. In relation to Israel, Biden was more of a warmonger than Trump and didn’t even attempt a Gaza ceasefire deal.

Trump: Bullshit Artist, Blowhard & Bully

Like all bullies he likes to throw his weight around against those he perceives as easy pickings. So, he has sent troops and the National Guard into American cities (but only those governed by Democrats); he has weaponised immigration raids and mass deportations; he has attacked the media, universities, the courts and gutted the public service; his policies have targeted women, migrants, and the poor while making his robber baron cronies even richer.

His political philosophy, if he can be said to have one, is plutocracy, with him, his family and America’s oligarchs at the top of the pyramid. It is gangster capitalism, a model which the Mafia would recognise. He has directed the State to vilify, attack and prosecute his enemies, including erstwhile allies. As a would-be dictator, he understands that his greatest threat is not external.

It is not China, or Iran or Venezuela – they are just the useful enemies that the American Empire must have to justify its obscene military spending and permanent preparation for war (just the names of these enemies change from one decade to the next). No, Trump understands that his greatest threat is internal, it is the American people, they are the enemy who must be deceived and/or intimidated. Trump’s real enemy is democracy, which is why he is ceaselessly waging war on it, on many fronts simultaneously… Trump has not tried to even start on any of his declared imperialist projects, nor has he succeeded in destroying American democracy. Indeed, he has succeeded in stirring up massive opposition among the American people.

Venezuela

I wrote the above in late 2025 and, obviously, things have changed and seriously for the worse. Trump finally graduated from bullshit bellicosity to actually launching imperialist wars, starting with the January 2026 lightning strike on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. In the business language of Trump’s world, this was a hostile takeover, one of “The Godfather” variety.

It involved getting rid of the rival boss, replacing him with a more compliant one (the Vice President in this case) and leaving the ruling system in place – so long as it now cedes control of its huge supply of oil to the US. Trump and co were quite open about this. Venezuela was all about oil. As I said, transactional imperialism. None of the various opposition leaders got a look in; democracy was not one of Trump’s motives for “liberating” the country.

Iran

Venezuela did Iran no favours by making Trump think that defeating his international enemies would be easy. So, hand in hand with Israel’s Netanyahu, his partner in crime and a bona fide war criminal (not to mention, a common or garden criminal, just like Trump), he went charging in. It was the same top-down modus operandi, one followed by Israel for decades – murder your enemy’s leadership and expect them to collapse.

It hasn’t worked for Israel in the decades it has been fighting Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and it hasn’t worked for the US and Israel in their 2026 war against Iran, despite inflicting massive death and destruction. Unlike Venezuela, Iran fought back very hard, taking the fight directly to Israel, directly to the numerous US military bases throughout the region, and directly to their treacherous autocratic Arab neighbours who willingly host those bases and who perceive Iran to be a bigger threat than Israel (which is ironic, given that Israel has been the biggest cause of instability and disruption in the region for decades).

Most tellingly, Iran played its trump card (pun intended) and seized the world by the short and curlies, otherwise known as the Strait of Hormuz. Suddenly, it was once again all about the oil, but not in a good way for those Governments that silently cheered on the US and Israel but now found themselves facing an unprecedented fuel crisis, one solely attributable to Donald Trump.

Originally, I think Trump’s Iran motivation was ideological. He was willingly led by the nose by Netanyahu, who has his own motivations for wanting Iran destroyed and a Greater Israel created by imperial force. Trump is of the generation of Americans who still remember the national humiliation of the 1979-80 US Tehran Embassy hostages’ crisis which occurred under the leadership of a President, Jimmy Carter, perceived as weak. But Trump’s support for Iranian democracy via regime change by external forces was never realistic and didn’t last long.

As he became increasingly incoherent in offering any reasons for why he went to war with a country that hadn’t attacked the US, and was never going to, he invoked seizing control of Iran’s considerable oil supply as a motive. If he couldn’t seize it, he could at least seriously damage it, thus inflicting wounds on an energy competitor to the US and an energy supplier to the US’ enemies and rivals. Once again, oil was in the mix of leading reasons for transactional imperialism. The flip side of this transactionalism is that if the other party to the “deal” doesn’t play ball, the US will just go in, guns blazing, and take what it wants (or try to).

I must make clear that I’m no fan of the Iranian regime of hangmen, torturers and misogynist thugs. I’m no fan of theocracy as a system of government, regardless of whether the theocrats are Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists or Hindus (or Satanists, for that matter). For the same reason that I’m opposed to government by fundamentalist communists or capitalists – people don’t like their lives being forcibly controlled by fanatics. I won’t say any more about Iran at present, because the situation there is still very fluid as I write this and the outcome is yet unknown. What I will say is that none of the parties to this war – the US, Israel and Iran – has clean hands. They are all war criminals. Nor are the autocratic Gulf states innocent parties.

New Zealand

Trump’s transactional imperialism is not confined to the countries already mentioned in this article. It applies globally, including to NZ. The US sees China as its chief super power rival, so Trump launched a trade war on it via tariffs. That didn’t go so well and one adverse result for the US was that China became more reluctant in supplying the rare earth minerals that are so vital to the US military and high-tech industries – China is the world’s biggest source of them.

So, in 2026, the US has set out to systematically bully the world’s countries, including NZ, to sign critical minerals deals with it. In NZ’s case, the US is after the likes of vanadium and antimony (but also coal and gold). The threat of tariffs (in addition to those already in force against NZ) is the stick being wielded. Greenpeace NZ wrote⁵: “The USA is putting aside billions of dollars to build a stockpile of ‘critical’ minerals, calling it ‘Project Vault’. Project Vault is tied into its network of security alliances and national security priorities ... A minerals deal with the USA would accelerate destructive mineral extraction from the land and seas of Aotearoa. It would open the door to new projects such as seabed mining – an untested extractive industry with short term economic gain and high environmental costs.”

In NZ, the main potential player in this scenario is a proposed seabed mining project off the Taranaki coast. To quote Greenpeace again:⁶ “Trans-Tasman Resources is a wannabe seabed mining company from Australia that is targeting vanadium: a mineral used to strengthen iron and steel, and a key component in fortified metals used for missiles and military aircraft. It’s also used in batteries and magnets, and has been added to the ‘critical minerals’ list ... Our courts, including the Supreme Court, have rejected this industry repeatedly because it would be an environmental disaster. All their attempts to get consent have been rejected by every court, including the Supreme Court, and most recently even the pro-industry Fast Track expert panel”.

Time To Stand Up To US Again

It is good news that this environmentally disastrous and morally dubious seabed mining project has been stopped, at least for now. But NZ is still very much on the hook to “play its part” in this brave new world of transactional imperialism. We have a Government that is supine and craven towards the US, even more so than usual for NZ governments. If I had to sum it up in one word, I’d choose “gutless”. So, as per usual, it will be up to the New Zealand people to navigate our way through the minefield that Trump has made of global geopolitics. We’ve stood up to the US before; it’s long past time to do so again.

CAFCA promotes the concept of an independent Aotearoa based on policies of economic, military and political self-reliance, using Aotearoa's resources for the benefit of the people of Aotearoa, and refusing involvement in the self-serving military and economic treaties of big foreign countries. We oppose foreign control, irrespective of which country it involves. We oppose the exploitation of Aotearoa's people and resources by foreign companies, and any foreign military or intelligence activities in Aotearoa. CAFCA does not support the replacement of foreign exploiters with local ones. New Zealand big business interests are collaborating with foreign companies in the exploitation of its own country - its only loyalty is to improve profits. CAFCA is not racist. We do not oppose the people of foreign countries, only the transnational corporations (TNCs) exploiting the people of New Zealand. CAFCA's full Charter is at https://www.cafca.org.nz/about-cafca/#our-charter/ .