By Cyrille MWAUKA MASIMANGO
History never advances in a straight line. It moves through ruptures, contradictions, and the successive collapse of dominant powers. No empire disappears through simple biological exhaustion; it falls when its own mechanisms of domination become the accelerators of its historical disintegration. What the world is witnessing today in the diplomatic repositioning of the United States toward China goes far beyond the framework of a mere protocol event: it is a major geopolitical symptom revealing the organic crisis of Western capitalism and the gradual reconfiguration of the world order.
The presence of Donald Trump within a political sequence strategically dominated by the authority of Xi Jinping carries profound symbolic significance. For decades, Washington imposed upon the world the verticality of its power: monetary supremacy, military domination, informational control, and diplomatic centrality. Today, that imperial architecture remains formidable, yet it is progressively ceasing to be unquestionable.
The American unipolar order born after 1991 rested upon a fundamental historical illusion: the eternity of the Western liberal model. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Atlantic elites triumphantly proclaimed “the end of history,” as though financialized capitalism had become the irreversible destiny of humanity. The West believed it had frozen the movement of the world. It is now discovering that history had never ceased preparing its return.
Western capitalism is now entering a phase of systemic saturation. Hyper-financialized speculation, progressive deindustrialization, chronic debt, social fragmentation, the precarization of popular classes, and the erosion of institutional legitimacy: the internal contradictions of the Atlantic model are reaching a critical threshold. The imperial bourgeoisie still possesses colossal military power, yet it is progressively losing its capacity to generate universal adherence around its civilizational model.
And therein lies the danger.
Empires often become more aggressive when they begin losing their historical monopoly. American imperialism remains capable of sanctions, hybrid wars, regional destabilization, and economic suffocation. Yet behind this brutality now persists a profound strategic anxiety: that of an imperial center sensing absolute global control slipping through its hands.
Meanwhile, China advances with the patience of historical powers. Where the West speculated, Beijing planned. Where Washington militarized, China industrialized. Where Atlantic powers exported geopolitical chaos, Beijing consolidated trade corridors, infrastructure, technological sovereignty, and productive influence.
The twenty-first century is therefore witnessing the emergence of a new global contradiction: the old imperial center still retains military superiority while the new productive center progressively conquers economic centrality.
The world is thus entering a phase of conflictual transition in which an old order refuses to die while a new order still struggles to define its final form.
For the peoples of the Global South, this reconfiguration demands dialectical lucidity and revolutionary maturity. A serious anti-imperialist consciousness never replaces Western subordination with Eastern fascination. The central problem remains the global structure of domination and the historically subordinate position assigned to the peripheries of the Global South.
From Bandung to contemporary debates surrounding the BRICS, a common aspiration has traversed formerly colonized peoples: to definitively escape the geopolitical tutelage of imperial centers. Yet the history of African independences demonstrates a brutal truth: political sovereignty without economic autonomy remains a vulnerable illusion.
Africa continues to occupy an extractive function within the international division of labor. The Democratic Republic of the Congo tragically embodies this historical contradiction: geological abundance, social poverty; mineral centrality, strategic marginalization; potential wealth, organized dependency. Our lands fuel the global digital economy while our populations inherit structural underdevelopment.
This imbalance is not an anomaly of the system; it constitutes one of the conditions for the reproduction of global capitalism itself. Behind the humanitarian discourse of Western powers always lie material, energetic, and financial interests. Modern imperialism no longer governs solely through weapons; it governs through debt, technological dependence, financial institutions, and control over global production chains.
Whenever African leaders attempted to break this neocolonial architecture, they were methodically neutralized. Patrice Lumumba understood that independence devoid of economic sovereignty remained an administrative fiction. His elimination was less the assassination of a man than the premature crushing of an African historical trajectory.
Even today, an African comprador bourgeoisie continues to administer locally the interests of international capital. This dependent elite speaks the language of patriotism during ceremonies while structurally organizing the continent’s economic subordination. It remains one of the principal obstacles to any genuine African sovereign renaissance.
The current multipolar shift nevertheless opens a major historical breach. Progressive de-dollarization, the rise of the BRICS, the relative fragmentation of Western hegemony, and the diversification of international alliances are creating contradictions favorable to peoples long marginalized. Yet no global geopolitical transformation will automatically produce African liberation.
Without sovereign industrialization, scientific mastery, educational revolution, Pan-African integration, and strategic independence, multipolarity will amount to nothing more than a redistribution of domination among competing powers.
The fundamental question therefore becomes historical: will Africa seize the crisis of the old imperial world to become once again a subject of universal history, or will it remain eternally the periphery of systems it enriches without ever directing?
The image of Trump facing Xi Jinping will likely remain one of the symbols of the gradual displacement of the world’s center of gravity. Not yet the definitive fall of the American empire, but unquestionably the beginning of its historical desacralization.
For the peoples of the Global South are beginning to understand a truth that imperial centers long succeeded in concealing: the West is no longer the natural destiny of the world; it is merely one historical sequence among others.
Empires always collapse precisely at the moment they believe themselves eternal.
And the twenty-first century may well become the century in which the historical peripheries finally cease fearing the imperial center.
Cyrille MWAUKA MASIMANGO
Director General – CEO
EDITORIAL CORPORATION SARL