We are happy to share the English translation of our book, Nella Terza guerra mondiale. Un lessico politico per le lotte del presente (DeriveApprodi, 2025), as a free ebook. What follows is the 2026 Preface to the English edition, also read the English translation of the original Introduction.
Preface to the English edition
When we published the Italian edition of this book in May 2025, it was already clear that what we called the Pax Trumpiana was an integral part of the Third World War scenario. The fragments of peace achieved have been nothing but the continuation of war by other means, while both peace and war have become tools of domestic politics and ways to impose the needs of US capitalism. Since he took office, the “pacifist” Trump bombed Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria, and now has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro. He did so to force a reversal of the policies of state control over strategic commodities—oil first and foremost—set in motion by Hugo Chávez twenty-five years ago, and thereby to curb Russian, and above all Chinese, influence in Latin America. The “special military operation” ordered by the Trump administration lays bare the essentially void nature of any appeal to international law. It belongs fully to the Third World War—understood as beginning with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—because it is driven by an arrogant and desperate attempt to reassert U.S. supremacy amid a transnational disorder that is increasingly ungovernable.
The celebration of supposedly irresistible American power confirms that militarism is steering the White House: military action is explicitly legitimized as the means to secure safety and profits for the United States and for those who submit to its claim to hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. This is one of the key principles of Trump’s new National Security Strategy. For this reason, the military operation in Venezuela goes well beyond the aim of “regime change”, an aim that, day by day, appears less relevant and less necessary in light of Caracas’s readiness to cooperate. It also goes beyond the repudiation of national sovereignty and peoples’ self-determination, principles that international law has in any case ceased to safeguard for some time now.
In this transnational disorder, it is no longer necessary to invoke the exporting of democracy—which for today’s West has become little more than an antiquarian relic—to justify war. Nor is it any longer necessary to wrap brutality in the cloak of progress, civilization, or modernization: the old rhetorical screens have fallen. War is asserted openly as war—an ever-available means of seizing other people’s territories and resources, and a tool for ensuring the valorization of capital. The Trumpian state thus behaves like a textbook imperialist state, promising individual capitalists fresh opportunities for valorization and a smoother rhythm of accumulation, but it does so in a phase defined by instability and shocks—features of a world war that cannot, in truth, be governed.
We must therefore ask: does this resurgence of imperialism amount to its full-scale return, or is it rather a posture—an ideological maneuver saturated with militarism—without the material foundations to give it real substance? Placing the latest events in Venezuela within the Third World War means for us to question the old words that were used to read a reality that has by now irrevocably passed. As a matter of fact, if there are continuities with Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-century imperialism, and with the neocolonialism of the late twentieth century—“the last stage of imperialism,” in Kwame Nkrumah’s famous formulation—there are also stark differences. The major oil firms have proved slow, if not openly reluctant, to fall in behind Trump’s imperial designs. And Trump’s insistence that he will be the one to decide Venezuela’s fate does not resolve the issue of the institutional, financial, and political guarantees that companies demand before making investments.
Trump’s imperial projections—and the surplus of political command he must continually invoke the more its ineffectiveness becomes apparent—do not, in short, offer capital a safe bargain, as was the case in classical imperialism and, in different ways, in neocolonialism. And this is not because of the still-uncertain transition at the top of the Caracas government, but because no state—not even the United States—now possesses the capacity to tame the transnational disorder and impose stable political control over it. There is no longer a Wilhelmine empire able to mobilize German industrial and financial capital for its power politics in Africa and Asia; but neither is there a Gaullist state that, with one hand, abandoned Algeria while, with the other, escorted French energy companies into the heart of the Sahara to exploit its oil fields, according to the classic neocolonial model. Nor is there any longer a George W. Bush state that, through “international policing,” could still aspire to restore an order and a peace steeped in terror to the global market. Those state forms have been swallowed by the swirls of transnational disorder, and they are unlikely to resurface.
However much it postures as a collective capitalist, it is therefore reasonable to doubt that the Trumpian state can truly function as one today, given capital’s fully transnational character and the infrastructural power that operates within global production chains. Beyond the United States’ overt imperial stance, alignment between the state—in this case, the United States—and the largest capitalist firms is far from guaranteed. That is also why the Trump administration must lift its chin and flex its muscles, proclaiming that it can subordinate to its designs a transnational capital that has long made instrumental use of the state when necessary while retaining wide margins of autonomy. In this way, too, the militarist ideology that fuels the world disorder of war is displayed—an ideology that, within national borders, is meant to bind together social blocs that are beginning to fray or to revolt, as they did in Minneapolis, New York, Portland, and other U.S. cities against the unpunished violence of ICE’s thuggish squads.
The price Trumpian militarism is extracting from living labor in the United States is enormous. Dismantling what remains of the social content of the old twentieth-century state and replacing it with a state free to act through its military apparatus requires the full availability for work of men and women who have been stripped, among other things, of collective bargaining—even in those workplaces where it continued, battered, to survive. Resignation to dark times is never an answer. Instead, we must look to those subjects who move beneath Trump’s imperial pretensions, within and against the contradictions and limits of his militarism as of his fragile peace projects, to make out the contours of a plausible social opposition—one whose image is currently obscured by a muscular display of force in Latin America and, tomorrow, perhaps in Greenland.
To underline the contradictions of this purported imperialism does not mean waiting for opposition to Trump to come from transnational corporations, which will, as always, find spaces in which to expand their balance sheets. In the context of the climate crisis, the capital Trump would like to command reveals its irrationality precisely in its refusal to abandon—or even scale back—fossil fuels. If Trump speaks of Venezuela only in terms of oil, it is nonetheless clear that all his threats toward Latin American countries are part both of a global trajectory of confrontation with China’s rise and of a kind of encirclement war against the progressive governments of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Trump and Trumpism are trying to settle accounts with governments that have actually intervened in wealth distribution and in long-standing hierarchies, unleashing processes of mass politicization.
From our standpoint, however, we also have to reckon with the limits of those experiences and with the contradictions and polarizations they generated within their own social base, so as not to capitulate to what today may otherwise appear as total political impotence in the face of the violent and uncontrolled ascent of the right in countries such as Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. From the standpoint of living labor, it is not possible today to defend the indefensible Maduro or to mourn Chávez’s Bolivarian project. For this reason, beyond the geopolitical puzzle of Latin America and without indulging in nostalgia, our concern is to reassert the standpoint of women, workers, and migrants—even now, when that standpoint seems to vanish before the apparently unchallenged supremacy of armed violence, state authoritarianism, militarism, and patriarchy.
We must recognize that labor, feminist, and Indigenous movements in Venezuela do not accommodate themselves to the present state of affairs. We must stand with the miners of the Orinoco Mining Arc, whom Maduro—already with Decree 2248—handed over to hyper-exploitation and sexual violence, to forms of slave- and child-labor fed by U.S., Canadian, Russian, and Chinese multinationals, and whose conditions will certainly not improve under the new Trumpian course. Beneath the surface of a bankrupt Bolivarianism—one that has financed Venezuela’s recent economic growth by compressing workers’ wages—there is a social conflict to improve living and working conditions that, in the public as in the private sector, has challenged government repression and today constitutes the only credible opposition to Trump’s plans and the tenets of the only politics of peace that erases the very causes of war.
We must therefore take their side, as well as the side of the tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants on U.S. soil who, already deprived by Trump of guarantees of residence, now wonder what will become of their permits once Venezuela is supposed to return to being a country “freed” from the odious “dictator.” The specter of deportation makes clear one of the principal spoils of this war—especially since National Security demands that whatever government sits in Caracas manage migration flows from Venezuela according to the principle of profitable security.
In the search of a lexicon for the struggles of the present, we ask: does the lens of anti-imperialism really help us understand these movements, and what they share with those who, on this side of the ocean, oppose a Europe at war, and with those in the United States who reject Trump’s policies? We doubt it, because it tends to reproduce the logic of campist geopolitics, preventing us from fully embracing the transnational character that social struggles, too, must now assume if they are to unfold politically. Transnational disorder nullifies any hope of socialism in a single country—or a single region—and of an internationalism that nourishes false hopes in “resistant” states or conjures alliances among peoples who are not invincibly united but are traversed by fractures and differences that can be rearticulated only on a transnational level. The transnational dimension does not pose merely a quantitative problem of scale, but a qualitative one: it changes the nature of the social relation of capital within, across, and beyond state borders and therefore demands a new organizational structure of class relations—no longer recomposable within any international, national, regional, bipolar, or multipolar order. The essay added as an appendix to this English edition, and previously published in Italian on our website, shows that the genocide in Gaza and the project of the Gaza Riviera cannot be understood simply as the repetition of a century-long colonial logic but needs to be considered as the reactivation of that conflict within new transnational dynamics.
Anti-imperialist and campist options thus remain perpetually one step behind a Third World War that, day after day, presses forward, intensifies, and ramifies. We will not build opposition to this war and to Trump’s imperial plans by backing supposed dissident governments. They don’t become our friends simply because they are outside of the Western axis. We will build an opposition to the Third World War only from the movements and struggles of women, LGBTQ+ people, migrants, workers, students, and working people that already exist or are taking shape. We need a transnational politics of peace to expand these movements and struggles and to rearticulate them within a broader political space in which all those who, everywhere, are paying the military and social costs of the world war now under way can communicate and recognize one another. A politics capable of opposing a war that is not localized in a single point but claims to saturate our entire lives—leaving them suspended by the thread of bombardment on battlefields, crushing them elsewhere in the gears of unending labor, impoverishing them everywhere until not even the shadow of refusal and insubordination remains.
Yet this nightmare of a Trumpian night is not already reality, nor it is our destiny. Not only do we see flashes of opposition to the current administration spreading across the United States; in Palestine as in Ukraine, in Iran as in Venezuela, men and women have never ceased to fight against the “double siege” of those who bring war and extermination from outside and those who, from within, seek to neutralize every form of struggle that is not subordinated to the logic of blood and oppression that war itself imposes. This is the path traced by those who, in recent years, have survived and resisted missiles, drones, and snipers. It seems to us a path worth taking also for those who, on this side of the world, within a Europe at war, are struggling—in a more or less organized way—against militarism and its logic.
At the end of the book, we wrote that, against the inevitability of war, we need to build an organization that should turn our politics of peace into a practical guide for preparing the conditions of a transnational social strike against the war and its world. In autumn 2025 we saw dozens of Italian cities being stormed by workers, students, migrants, women, men and LGBTQ+ on strike against the genocide in Palestine and the logic of war, while hundreds of thousands of people were demonstrating around the world. We have seen students in Germany going on strike in 100 cities against the introduction of compulsory military service. We are now seeing millions of people in Iran risking their lives and refusing to entrust their liberation from the Islamic Republic to the bombs threatened by Trump. Now we can sense what a strike against war can actually mean more clearly than we did one year ago. This makes the call for a transnational organization that is up to the task of making this possibility a long-lasting force even more urgent.
Cover image: Nell’urlo delle piazze, ink drawings and collage by Francesca Della Santa; photos by Stella Chirdo