Trump and US imperialism—an interview with Joel Geier
The Trump administration’s shock and awe campaign has continued unabated since the presidential inauguration in late January. While it appears to be a succession of crazed announcements and outbursts, there is more to it. Last month, veteran socialist Joel Geier was in Australia to present a series of educational talks. He sat down with Red Flag in late February to explain what he thinks is the rational core of Trumpism.
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How should we understand Trump’s ambitions for US imperialism?
Since Trump was inaugurated, he has unleashed a campaign of shock and awe, the doctrine the Americans used when they invaded Iraq in 2003: the psychological warfare called radical domination, designed to throw so many things at people that they become paralysed and cannot fight back.
Domestically this has involved pardoning all 6 January prisoners, doing away with diversity, equity and inclusion, wiping out the federal government’s 1964 anti-racist hiring law, ending all the rights that trans people have, firing huge numbers of government employees and an unending list of other targets.
Internationally, Trump has threatened to invade Panama. He has threatened tariffs on Mexico, Colombia and Canada that would destroy their economies. Trump has said the US will take over Greenland. Trump is demanding that Ukraine hand over half of all its rare earth minerals as repayment for US backing in the war against Russia; he has said he will do a deal with Putin to end the war. Trump has openly called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Among all of this madness, there is a method tied to a much larger project—to prepare the American economy, military and population for competition and confrontation with its rival China, up to and including the possibility of a world war.
This will not take place immediately since the United States is currently totally incapable of going to war against China and has been unprepared to do so for many years. But this is the reason behind all the chaos—it is not just random slingshots.
Unlike his first administration, Trump now has the support of decisive sectors of the American ruling class to carry this project out. They don’t agree with everything that he is doing. But the changes in world politics and economics in recent years caused them to support what he is doing to prepare the American population for a confrontation with China.
Explain the great power rivalry between the US and China
The United States has never had an opponent and challenger as important as China. China is economically and militarily the strongest opponent the United States has had. It is much stronger than Russia in the Cold War, which provided no economic competition. Economically China is stronger than Germany or Japan were before the Second World War.
There has been nothing like China’s rise in the last 25 years since the rise of the United States from 1860 to 1890, when the US went from being a backward country to the leading industrial power in the space of 20 to 30 years.
During this time, China has become the workshop of the world. When the US globalised the economy in the early 1990s, it exported the bulk of its industry to China. The US is now dependent upon Chinese goods, industry and supply chains—from iPhones to instrument panels in US army planes, for military supplies and everyday things that everyone relies on.
Twenty-five years ago, the United States was the major trading partner for most countries worldwide. China has now displaced the United States on the world market, so much so that China is now the main trading partner for 120 countries.
Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has attempted to organise Asia, Africa and Europe into one economic zone under Chinese domination. Through Made in China 2025, China laid out its plans to be dominant in a number of industries, including electric vehicles, lithium batteries, solar and others, in which it is now leading. It also aimed to be independent of the United States in high tech, semiconductors, AI and so on.
For the past fifteen years, the United States has tried different approaches to contain China—which have failed.
First was Obama, who tried to get the US out of the endless, failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost up to $6 trillion. Instead, Obama tried to “pivot to Asia” and confront China by setting up economic relations with the rapidly growing Asian countries. The centrepiece of this was the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Obama did, however, achieve two things that are important in US efforts to take on China.
He opened up oil production in the United States. Prior to this, the US was the main oil importer in the world, dependent upon oil from the Middle East. Obama opened up so much fracking that the United States is now the leading oil producer in the world, greater than Saudi Arabia or Russia.
Obama also started the trillion-dollar program to modernise US nuclear weapons. Most people think: “Well, we really can’t go to war, because it would be a nuclear war, and that would wipe out mankind”. That is not how the American or Chinese ruling classes think, both of whom are preparing for nuclear war.
Trump’s first presidency imposed tariffs on China to force it to buy American goods. He promised to lift the tariffs if they did so, so that the balance of payments between the United States and China would disappear. It was a total failure. The deficit with China continued to grow.
Trump did, however, achieve one thing—he raised the consciousness of the US ruling class about the threat of China; they started to shift towards preparing for a confrontation, which accelerated with three crises in recent years
The first was the pandemic, when the United States was cut off from the health supplies it depended on from China (like masks). Nor could it get the parts needed for various industries, which led to the shutting down of industrial production. It also led to inflation in goods and transport. The American ruling class became convinced that it could not rely on supply chains from China. And so the Biden administration supported a process of moving supply chains out of China to friendly countries like Vietnam or India (what’s called “friend shoring”), or to Mexico and others (called “near shoring”). But it failed to bring many industries back to the United States (reshoring).
Biden attempted to change the dynamic with China by returning to industrial policy—state support to restore a few industries in the United States (electric vehicles, solar panels and semiconductors). Biden also put sanctions on semiconductor exports to China to hold back Chinese development of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge high tech.
But the main change in American ruling class opinion was the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. From the vantage point of American imperialism, they’re proxy wars fought by somebody else. But the Americans have an interest in them and hence have been funding and arming one side against another.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine led to the successful restoration of US alliances with its allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific under Biden. Putin acted as the recruiting sergeant for US imperialism by declaring that Russia would exert a sphere of influence over all of Eastern Europe—that if Germany and France didn’t go along with his plans, he would cut off their oil and gas supplies and also threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
This changed the dynamics of imperialism in Europe. France, Germany and other European countries realised that they were incapable of defending themselves against a nuclear-armed Russia and that they wanted military protection from the United States. This led to the reassertion of NATO and increased military spending across Europe.
Just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China signed an alliance with Russia. China was no longer just a European trading partner but an ally of its threatening rival. Before Biden came into office, Germany was about to sign a European-wide trade agreement with China. That all ended under the Biden administration.
The war in Ukraine also convinced the US ruling class of two other things.
If there is going to be a war, you have to control the oil supply because economies and armies function on the basis of it. The United States provided over 60 percent of all the oil for the Allies during World War Two. The United States concluded it would not be leaving the Middle East—but would attempt to reassert control over Middle East oil.
The US ruling class also became conscious that they did not have the military capacity to go to war. For example, Ukraine sends 8,000 artillery shells every day into Russia. The United States could only produce 14,000 a month—less than two days’ worth of shells. A war with China would daily demand many more shells.
The US added some capacity, but its antiquated factories, built before the Vietnam War, could only raise production to a paltry 40,000 shells a month. The Biden administration was incapable of changing the situation.
Then with the war in Gaza, the Israeli military provided the biggest American military victory in decades. The Americans have for years tried unsuccessfully to undermine Iran as its main Middle East rival. The Gaza war has been an enormous defeat, for Iran and its allies, as well as for Russia, which may lose its naval base in Syria.
The war in Gaza also illustrated the limits of American military capacity to fight a war on multiple fronts. While the Houthis in Yemen were bombing ships and preventing anyone from using the Suez Canal, the Americans attempted to take them out. In one day, the US used up much of its Tomahawk and Javelin missiles supply.
The United States cannot at this time produce many of the weapons that are indispensable to war with China. During World War Two, it was called “the arsenal of democracy”. As the world’s leading industrial country, it was able to shift its industrial production to war production. The US produced 70 percent of all the planes, tanks, ships, trucks and ammunition that supplied the Allied war effort. While today, ironically, it depends on the decisions of the Chinese Communist Party for many industrial and military supplies.
This overall change in the dynamics of world imperialism has convinced significant sections of the US ruling class to shift their support to Trump.
How does Trump’s program fit into this broader picture of great power rivalry between the US and China?
Trump’s project is the attempt to restore US power economically, politically and militarily against China. This means changing the dynamics of the world economy and politics for the last 40 years, in which globalisation allowed free trade in an integrated world market for goods and capital investments. These geostrategic relations of globalisation are over. If the US continued to maintain free trade, it would continue to lose to China. Trump has campaigned for years that preceding administrations were losers and the US was being taken advantage of economically by the rest the world. The US ruling class became convinced it was losing to China, and that Trump’s program provided the elements to restore American power.
Trump’s program is designed to bring industry and military production back to the United States, and not just to friendly countries as Biden did. For example, Mexico, which has a free trade agreement with the US, sends 80 percent of its exports to the United States. Chinese companies opened factories in Mexico to gain tariff-free entry to the US market At least 20 percent and more of the value of Mexican exports to the US are from Chinese or Chinese shell companies. As Trump put it, as he threatens tariffs on all Mexican goods—we made a pact with Mexico, not with China.
But how do you bring back production to the United States? American corporations have had had no state discipline over them for decades and to make greater profits shifted production to China, India, Vietnam and other places where labour is cheaper.
To convince US companies to re-shore, Trump’s proposals are designed to make it more profitable to produce in the United States than elsewhere.
Tariffs are usually used to protect new industries in developing countries. But the United States, the richest, most advanced and powerful country in the world, has become similar in many industries to an underdeveloped country. Trump’s tariffs are to protect American production by keeping out foreign competition, which allows for domestic companies to increase prices and profits.
He proposes to cut corporate taxes from 21 percent to 15 percent (perhaps more for American companies that produce in the United States) and to raise taxes on their production abroad.
A major element in increasing profits is giving capitalists the “freedom” to produce however they want to through deregulation, destroying all the laws protecting workers and the public, and starving or dismantling the agencies that enforce them.
The Trump administration is going to lift all restrictions on oil and gas production to provide cheaper energy. They plan for the US to be not just energy independent but energy dominant, with cheaper energy for US industry than its competitors. Environmental protection is out the window.
Trump wants to fundamentally revise the government and military budget. The United States Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is US$30 trillion a year. The government budget this year was $6.75 trillion, with a deficit of $1.6 trillion. Interest on the national debt was $1 trillion, now equal to the $1 trillion war budget. Trump proposed quickly raising the war budget to 5 percent of GDP, to one and a half trillion dollars. And that’s just for starters—during the Cold War, the war budget was 6 to 8 percent, sometimes 10 percent of GDP every year. They want that money to modernise the army, to subsidise munitions factories and to develop new forms of high tech and AI warfare.
Their plans include cuts to the 40 percent of the war budget that goes for wages, health expenses and benefits of the professional volunteer army that followed the collapse of the army in Vietnam. They want to undo Vietnam and everything that has occurred socially since the 1960s. In the long term, they are thinking of the return of the draft without the necessity of expensive salaries and benefits.
They need to restore a ship-building industry. If they can’t get it with private companies, they will try to start it through the state budget.
The Trump administration is also trying to change the perception of warfare. Today, 77 percent of draft-age males would fail the draft test because they are obese, they take drugs, they’re on meds, etc. That’s part of what this whole anti-woke, masculine energy is all about—trying to get the population in shape so that they can “restore the warrior ethos”.
The culture that has to be developed is for an army like the Israeli army—that can carry out “collateral damage of civilians” and war crimes. Many people view the Israelis as the only genocidal army around. But the US is also genocidal. In one night’s bombing in Dresden, the United States, killed 25,000 people, in Hamburg 37,000, and in the firebombing of Tokyo, 100,000 people. And then there was Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Vietnam and Indochina, two to three million people were killed, a majority of them civilians. In the Iraq war, the US killed 500,000 people, half of whom were civilians. That’s what it means to be anti-woke. That’s why they’re trying to get rid of people sympathetic to diversity and inclusion. They need warriors when they go to war.
Immigration also plays its part. If you’re going to war, you need secure borders. You can’t have anyone just crossing your border. There’s also the attempt to create patriotic, xenophobic, racist sentiments in the population. That we are all united, not divided by diversity. We’re all united together against the rest of the world.
The US is in a strong position to initiate this new phase of world imperialism. But in just a few weeks, it has also shown how Trump and America’s rulers are capable of such outlandish, bizarre, amateurish, and idiotic political disasters that could impede, set back or slow it down.
The Arab states forced Trump to do a hasty retreat on his “final solution” plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. This was followed the attempt by Trump’s key representatives, Musk and Vance, to rally German support for the fascist Alternative for Germany, which turned into farce.
The most incredible was the US claim that Putin did not invade Ukraine, that Ukraine started the war; culminating in Trump’s mafia-type demands for a protection payment of $500 billion of rare minerals at the same time that the US bars Ukraine from US negotiating its fate with Putin. This is one for the history books—one of the US’s most odious scandals that will damage its reputation. The main message here is to convince the world that you can’t trust the Americans.
The American ruling class did not endorse these Trump policies—they were generally embarrassed, appalled, discouraged, but remained silent throughout this kick-off of “Making America Great Again”. But as a class, they are too committed to Trump’s overall plan economically and militarily to publicly oppose it. Despite their immense wealth and self-importance, they are politically stupid, weak, cowardly, cowed and frightened by a semi-Bonaparte Trump—they have lined up to kiss his ring and are still deluded by greed and with his promises of immense wealth.
Opposition to Trump’s agenda will require popular upheaval from below. It will take time to develop the necessary confidence, consciousness and structures for an effective fightback. But already, in the first “honeymoon” month of Trump’s presidency, the hostility to his policies unleashed popular anger, a rapid decline of consumer confidence, a disgust with the passivity of liberal politics. None of these are certainties, but they are all early hopeful signs of a molecular process to rebuild a fighting left.
What are the tasks for revolutionary socialists in this new era of imperialism?
Where there is imperialism, eventually there is also anti-imperialism.
Right now, the left that was awakened by Gaza is against war and genocide. But for the most part, we are dealing with a new generation in which virtually nobody has any conceptions about imperialism.
For my generation, the question of war and imperialism was over Vietnam. For your generation, it will be between the United States and China.
Revolutionary socialists have to be the people who explain to newly radicalising people what is actually occurring, what the dynamics are, what the possibilities are, and how imperialism does two things.
One, it creates social patriotism. In World War One, the German Social Democrats and socialist parties in other countries supported their governments. It destroyed the socialist movement. During the Cold War, social democrats supported “democratic” Washington and Stalinists and Orthodox Trotskyists supported “workers’ Russia”. The workers’ movement internationally was gutted in the Cold War by imperialism.
But imperialism also radicalises people. It is what led to the many working-class revolutions from 1905 in Russia to 1974-75 in Portugal. These revolutions came out of opposition to war and imperialism and radicalised sections of the working class.
We are the political heirs of those only radicals who have opposed all imperialism and who have never supported any imperialist war. We were for neither Washington nor Moscow, but for the third camp of international socialism. We have never supported any ruling class domestically or when they went to war. And we have always supported any nation fighting for national liberation.
As the conflict between the two superpowers develops, our job is to convince a new generation to fight imperialism, to fight the ruling classes of the United States, China, Australia, Russia and so on. If a socialist movement is to be successful, it has to be rebuilt on a total opposition to imperialism and the ruling classes. Otherwise, it will collapse, as social democracy and Stalinism did. If the socialist movement is not built on opposition to imperialism, it is being built on sand.
