Suddenly, Greenland doesn’t seem so outlandish. Not since before the end of the Cold War has the United States so forcefully and directly intervened in the Western Hemisphere. Amassing an armada to blockade Venezuela before bombing the country and kidnapping its president. Threatening the president of Colombia with a similar fate. Suggesting action against Mexico as well, while intimating that it’s the end of days for the Cuban government—and indeed any government that doesn’t toe Washington’s line. The US government couldn’t be clearer about its intentions, which White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/05/politics/video/senior-white-house-aide-stephen-miller-says-us-military-threat-to-maintain-control-of-venezuela-digvid" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">outlined in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper yesterday</a>: 
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world—the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time ... The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
The audacity is shocking, but this didn’t come out of nowhere. And it is certainly <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-long-and-bloody-legacy-of-the-us-in-latin-america">not unprecedented</a>. The first Trump administration made no secret of its desire to shore up what it, and almost every US government of the last 200 years, considers to be its property and primary “sphere of influence”. So in 2019, national security adviser John Bolton, <a href="https://ni.usembassy.gov/national-security-advisor-ambassador-john-r-bolton-delivers-remarks-at-bay-of-pigs-veterans-association-brigade-2506/">while announcing sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua</a>, declared: “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well”.
That policy, outlined in 1823 and later named after its originator, James Monroe, the country’s fifth president, was a warning to the European powers that the US would not tolerate them interfering in the region. It was a bold assertion by a pre-industrial state that had only recently gained independence: we claim an exclusive right to oversee the Western Hemisphere.
Eighty years later, <a href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/roosevelt-corollary#transcript">the so-called Roosevelt Corollary</a>, named after Theodore Roosevelt, expanded the Monroe Doctrine. The president addressed the Congress in 1904, declaring that the United States would not only oppose European influence, but directly intervene into the affairs of regional states:
“Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
This was a precedent setting doctrine for more than a century of overt and covert interventions into the Caribbean and Central and South America. Now, the White House is asserting the “Trump Corollary”, outlined in the latest <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf">national security strategy</a>, issued in November. The document lists the “restoration of American power and priorities” as one of five “core, vital
national interests”:
“[T]he United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets.”
So much for all the ink spilled by foreign policy commentators about Trump’s purported “isolationism” and reluctance to deploy US power. The national security strategy at times reads like a white supremacist manifesto. Understandably, much of the commentary related to it has focused on its warnings about the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe and its attacks on European governments for facilitating decades of non-European people’s migration into the continent.
Yet, for all its departures from convention, the core goal of this administration is consistent with all other US governments: retaining US geopolitical pre-eminence. Indeed, ever since the <a href="https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1987.pdf">first formal strategy document</a> issued by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan in 1987, US governments have used the language of mobilising or employing “all facets of national power” to maintain US dominance of the world. This motif appeared in the grand strategy documents of presidents <a href="history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1997.pdf">Bill Clinton</a> and <a href="history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss2002.pdf">George W. Bush</a>, Barack Obama’s <a href="obamawhitehouse.archives.govhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf">2010 national security strategy</a>, Trump’s <a href="trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf">2017 national security strategy</a> and <a href="dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf">2018 national defence strategy</a>, and Joe Biden’s 2022 <a href="whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf">national security</a>, <a href="media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF">national defence</a> and <a href="jcs.mil/Portals/36/NMS%202022%20_%20Signed.pdf">national military</a> strategies.
Key differences today are, first, that there is a belated recognition in Washington that a war against China in Asia is probably unwinnable; and, second, that the growth of Chinese industrial power and economic sophistication have been severely underestimated. Indeed, Trump’s and Biden’s attempts to use the tariff weapon have resulted only in Beijing increasing it’s industrial output and positive trade balance with the world, while precipitating a series of Chinese high-tech breakthroughs considered almost unthinkable just a decade ago. 
The “Trump Corollary” is therefore refining US imperialism’s approach. China is now South America’s main trading partner; Beijing has invested billions of dollars in nearly two dozen seaports and the broader continental logistics network, firmly integrating several supply chains into its economic orbit. Plus there are increasing financial and military links. So US strategists are initiating what they consider a rearguard action to shore up their region as an exclusive US domain.
Last year, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/16/panamas-president-alleges-us-threatening-to-revoke-visas-over-china-ties" target="_blank" title="alleged" rel="noreferrer noopener">alleged</a> that the US embassy threatened to revoke visas of Panamanian officials because of China’s close ties to the country. And after the US bailed out Argentina, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that President Javier Milei was “committed to getting China out” of the country. Now, the “Corollary” is in full view: a full-throated strategy not only of political interference, but of economic imperialism:
“We must re-secure our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life. This will require expanding American access to critical minerals and materials … [And] establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations…
“Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is another great American strategic mistake of recent decades. 
“Successfully protecting our Hemisphere also requires closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”
All countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, then, have been put on notice that a new era of US imperialist meddling has begun. It’s here that Greenland again comes into focus, both as a resource rich territory—with significant deposits of rare earth elements, other minerals and metals, and offshore oil and gas—and as an island of military value. 
In the interview with CNN’s Tapper, Miller, the White House aide, reiterated that the position of the Trump administration, going back to the president’s first term, is that Greenland should become part of the US and that there is no basis for Denmark’s territorial claim. Indeed, the formal position of the US government is that Greenland is a required territory for NATO’s operations in the arctic. Because the US is the only NATO signatory capable of projecting power in that area, Miller concluded, “obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States”.
There’s a precedent. During an April 1941 White House conference, Denmark’s ambassador to the US, Henrik de Kauffmann, told reporters: “Greenland [belongs] to the American continent”. The New York Times concurred, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1940/04/11/archives/greenland-raises-hemisphere-issue-monroe-doctrine-to-be-applied-if.html">noting</a>
that the island “lies well within the Western Hemisphere on all standard maps”. A short time later, President Franklin Roosevelt <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/excerpts-from-the-press-conference-42">declared</a>: “We are applying to Denmark what might be called a carrying out of the Monroe Doctrine ... and we are protecting Greenland against any other European nation”.
This was all occasioned by Germany’s occupation of Denmark, beginning the previous year. Roosevelt turned Greenland into a US protectorate, establishing military bases and taking control of its minerals, using the territory as a base of operations when it later entered the Second World War.
So again, the “Trump Corollary” isn’t as radical a departure as many suggest. But it is nevertheless a major escalation. We have become accustomed to referring to postwar periods: the post-Second World War era, the post-Vietnam era, the post-Cold War era. But we have potentially entered a new and dangerous prewar era of intense superpower jockeying in which bloc politics returns to the fore.

Ben Hillier

The Trump doctrine: a new prewar era?

President Trump’s intervention in Venezuela is just the latest move in a long and bloody history of US imperialism in Latin America. As US leaders prepare to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary this year, there is little to celebrate for the region south of its border, which Yale University academic Greg Grandin has aptly labelled the “workshop” of the US empire. 
When the thirteen former British colonies on the North American east coast formed the United States in the late eighteenth century, the dominant power on the American continent was the Spanish empire. But it was an empire in decay and, by the early 1820s, a series of independence wars ended over three centuries of Spanish rule in most of Latin America (as well as Portuguese rule in Brazil). The defeat of the Spanish, however, only intensified imperialist competition in the region as other European powers saw opportunities on the resource-rich continent. The US entered the contest with its Monroe Doctrine: a declaration of US hegemony in the region, ruling it off limits to the European powers. Through a series of treaties it was fairly successful in stopping any direct recolonisation of the area.
The threat of European imperialism was one of the main factors guiding US actions in the region in the early nineteenth century. The other was slavery. From the time of independence, the US southern states had maintained slavery in the face of a northern abolitionist movement by incorporating new slave states into the union. This gave rise to a strong movement in the South pushing for expansion into Mexico and Central America. The strategy bore fruit with the Mexican–American war of the late 1840s, US victory ending with the incorporation of the land roughly from Texas to California—more than half of Mexico’s territory. The US emerged from the war as a true continental power, its borders now stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
After the defeat of the southern confederacy in the 1860s, US imperialism in Latin America took on a different form. Territorial expansion was no longer its primary objective. With slave labour abolished, the forces of industrial capitalism were unleashed. Vast plains to the west, enthusiastic investors, and millions of former slaves and impoverished white workers provided the three essential ingredients for capitalist development: land, labour, and capital. The result was that the US in the second half of the nineteenth century experienced rapid capitalist development. Within a few decades, it became the world’s largest industrial and agricultural producer.
But underneath the growth hid a dangerous contradiction. The productive capacity of the US economy grew so large that by the end of the century the domestic market could no longer absorb its output. Rapid growth, consequently, was accompanied by a series of deep recessions due to severe falls in prices as supply so quickly outpaced demand. The expansion of the post-civil war period, therefore, was also a period of extreme crisis for the US ruling class. Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge, in an 1898 speech, acknowledged the problem: 
“American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours ... Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? ... The power that rules the Pacific ... is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic.”
This is the background to the Spanish–American war of the late 1890s. The US could never reach its true imperial potential while the European powers denied it access to certain markets and held colonies. The defeat of the last remnants of the Spanish empire, which still held important Caribbean islands such as Cuba and Pacific islands like the Philippines, was the pre-condition for the US entering a new period of imperialism in the early twentieth century. As one lawyer, Brooks Adams, wrote: “This war is the first gun in the battle for the ownership of the world”.
Victory in the war in 1898 established Cuba as nominally independent but an effective US colony. The only reason it did not become the 51st state was because the US sugar industry opposed the additional competition that would have come from Cuban sugar being sold tariff-free in the US market. The Philippines, however, was the real prize. The US occupied the country until the end of the second world war, crushing several independence movements.
With dominance secured in both the Atlantic and Pacific, a central priority became the construction of a canal linking the two oceans, allowing US firms privileged access to a key global trade route. The only problem was that the proposed site lay in Panama, which at the time was a province of Colombia rather than an independent state. When Colombia rejected a proposal to lease the territory, the US threatened military action and backed a separatist movement. A treaty was then swiftly concluded with a small group of Panamanian elites, granting US control over the canal in exchange for diplomatic recognition. This period, beginning with the Spanish–American war, opened a period of even more aggressive US imperialism. The supposedly peace-loving liberal President Woodrow Wilson expressed the sentiment in 1907: 
“Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.” 
Wilson’s words quickly became true. As Sydney Lens writes in his book The Forging of the American Empire: 
“By 1913 ... the United States had gained control of the tin industry in Bolivia, copper in Chile and Peru, and meat packing in Argentina and Paraguay. Its economic role was still distinctly secondary to Britain in that part of the world, but the American star was rising. J.P. Morgan and W.R. Grace operated the Chilean-Andean railroad, and American firms were making inroads into river transportation in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. John Bull [England] was already outpaced for the trade of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, and being pressed in Peru and Ecuador ... By making the Caribbean an “American lake” the United States guaranteed its dominance over the banana industry of Panama and Guatemala, the coffee industry of Haiti and El Salvador, the sugar industry of the Dominican Republic.”
And when economic means failed, military force was always available. In 1915, the US invaded Haiti because it would not cede control of its customs houses, resulting in a nineteen-year occupation. A year later, it invaded the Dominican Republic. A 1922 report from the US Congress, while the occupation was ongoing, admitted that “homes were burned; natives were killed; tortures and cruelties committed; and ‘Butcher’ Weyler’s horrible concentration camps were established”.
But for the US rulers, nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of the country’s rise. In the twenty years after the Spanish–American war, US manufacturing output increased six-fold. The two world wars further accelerated this trajectory. As the Cold War began and the European powers lost the last remnants of their empires, US control over Latin America was stronger than it had ever been.
Despite US hegemony, however, Latin America was one of the regions in which Soviet influence reached furthest. Through local communist parties, Russia established itself in some countries within the working class and the left. In other cases, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, pro-Moscow groups took state power. In the post-war period, therefore, the battle to maintain Latin America under US domination against Soviet influence became the lens through which foreign policy planners viewed the region. As US diplomat and the great theoriser of Soviet containment, George Kennan, said in 1948: “We have half the world’s wealth, but only 6 percent of its population. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity”.
That “pattern of relationships” in Latin America took the form of direct US military interventions (including biological and chemical weapons attacks, and forced starvation through the poisoning of crops), backing military coups, sponsoring right-wing death squads, and plunging entire countries into years-long civil wars. 
In 1944, a popular revolution in Guatemala overthrew a dictatorship and led to the election of a reformist government. But after ten years and subsequent democratic elections in which Jacobo Arbenz was elected, the US had had enough. This was particularly the case when the interests of the US United Fruit Company were threatened. Arbenz initiated a mild agrarian reform program, expropriated only unused land and offering compensation to the owners. The land reform program, consequently, had virtually zero impact on the United Fruit Company. Nonetheless, in 1954, the US orchestrated a coup to overthrow Arbenz. The military and paramilitary units unleashed horrendous violence upon the civilian population, murdering, raping and torturing thousands.
The Arbenz government was what US scholar Noam Chomsky calls “the threat of a good example”: any government or movement that, even in modest fashion, tries to improve the lives of ordinary people, is a threat to US interests because it offers the example of an alternative. This idea took on increased importance for the US after the Cuban revolution in 1959. When the forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew a US-backed dictator 90 miles from Florida, it set off major alarm bells for US foreign policy planners. Two years later, when those same rebels declared themselves to be communists and allied themselves with the Soviet Union, the US decided to make an example of Cuba. A strict trade embargo was placed on the island and, in 1961, the CIA trained a group of right-wing mercenaries to invade and overthrow the government. Although it failed, a clear message had been sent to the entire continent: this was the price of defiance.
The problem for the US, however, was that the Cuban revolution inspired the Latin American left. In nearly every country, guerilla groups formed with the goal of repeating some variation of the Cuban revolution. This combined with the radical period of the 1960s and 1970s, in which a series of urban mass movements developed across the continent. In some cases, the movements toppled governments, both democratic and dictatorship. In response, the US unleashed its infamous death squads in Central America and backed military regimes in South America, such as Chile.
Nicaragua was a prime example. Its case goes back to the early 1930s, when President Roosevelt, under the “good neighbour” policy, supported a military coup that brought Anastasio Somoza to power. He and his two sons established a family dynasty that ruled for 43 years. Nicaragua suffered a particularly violent fate because it was the only other country after Cuba in which a left-wing guerilla group actually won state power. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, financially and politically backed by Castro, won mass support among the peasantry and working class and played the leading role in the revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. 
When the Sandinistas took power, they gave land to the peasantry, expanded healthcare and education, and lifted a big group of the population out of poverty. As a result, Washington decided that Nicaraguans had to be punished. It was another case of the “threat of a good example”. When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the US became uncompromisingly committed to the violent overthrow of the Sandinista government. The CIA trained opposition paramilitaries and by early 1982 had launched airstrikes in the country. Despite the Sandinistas holding and winning elections in 1984, they lost in 1990. After a decade of civil war and more than 30,000 lives lost, they voluntarily gave up power to a US-backed candidate.
The early decades of the 21st century in Latin America gave rise to the so-called pink tide. Across the continent, left-wing, reforming leaders won elections on the promise of wealth redistribution to the poor and the working class. Many governments achieved significant improvements in quality of life for millions of people, largely thanks to China’s vast demand for Latin America’s resources. But the economics of this model were undercut around 2011 as China’s growth began to slow, leading many left governments, like the Workers’ Party in Brazil, to implement austerity. While some were prepared to challenge US economic control in the region, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who partially nationalised the oil industry, they were all bound to the logic of capitalism and the necessary alliances with imperial powers that stems from it. As such, the independence from the US that some of them won was replaced by reliance on China.
Remembering the bloody history of the United States in Latin America is essential in light of Washington’s latest criminality in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest known oil reserves. With China rapidly catching the US economically and militarily, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza having laid bare the sham of international law, there is little need for Trump to cloak US imperialism in the language of “democracy” and “liberty”. The might makes right imperialism of the early twentieth century is returning.

Tom Sullivan

The long and bloody legacy of the US in Latin America

The US has launched airstrikes against Venezuela, kidnapped its president, Nicolas Maduro, and is attempting a regime change—although at this point the government still stands. The order for this naked display of gangster imperialism came from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club for the one percent, where just days earlier he auctioned a portrait of Jesus for US$2.75 million and said his new year’s resolution was “peace on Earth”. 
There can be no peace with the Washington regime enforcing order. On every continent, military bases, CIA stations and multinational companies are engaged in a global war to continue or expand US domination. Extortion and terrorism are the norm for this rogue state. But this latest act is so brazen, so arrogant, that it beggars belief. This is the lawlessness of a criminal syndicate; the act of a mob-boss state.
Regime change in Venezuela has been a long-held goal of US foreign policy planners since the left-wing Hugo Chavez won the presidency in 1999 and initiated a program of wealth redistribution towards the poor and the working class. The country’s oil wealth underpinned the new president’s program. With the world’s largest known reserves, Chavez partially nationalised the sector. He and his successor Maduro increasingly turned to China as Washington turned the screws, including signing deals to sell oil at below world market prices.
Trump’s actions must be understood in the context of intensifying imperialist tensions between the United States and China. For Washington, the world’s largest oil reserves in a region it considers its “backyard” being sold at cut-price rates to its principal geopolitical rival was scandalous. This was part of the motivation for the US-backed coup attempt in 2002, when Chavez was detained for two days but ultimately failed. It also inspired the first Trump administration’s recognition of little-known politician Juan Guaido as the country’s “true” president. Guaido unsuccessfully called for the military to oust Maduro in a coup and publicly supported a US invasion.
While oil is important in US calculations, Maduro’s ouster is part of a broader attempt to shore up the Western hemisphere under US domination. Many governments have been overthrown in this region purely for not toeing the US line and displaying some concern for their own citizens’ wellbeing. Also, the region is home to crucial natural resources and has gradually been slipping out of US control. Such a brazen move to oust the leader of a country that has forged closer ties to China and Russia sends a clear message about what the US is prepared to do to maintain its hegemony.
Why now? Regional dynamics are important. The first decade and a half of the 21st century was dubbed the “pink tide”, as left-wing or left-leaning governments came to power across the continent. These leaders often used Chinese demand for their natural resources to lift millions of people out of poverty. But this model began to break down around 2011 when Chinese economic growth began to slow. Many of pink tide leaders turned to austerity and authoritarianism. 
Over the last decade, the political pendulum in the region has tipped back to the right. But it was not the same right as before the pink tide. Today, it is a hardened and radicalised right, inspired by Trump. Such governments are in power in Argentina, El Salvador, Bolivia and just won elections in Chile. 
Crucially, there is also a government-in-waiting in Venezuela. Since Chavez’s first election victory, Venezuela’s far right have openly supported US intervention. Now, they have finally got their wish. At the time of writing, it’s unclear how much, if any, of the US’s actions were coordinated with Venezuela’s far-right leaders and dissident military officers. 
Should they end up in power, however, the plan is clear. Their most prominent leader, Maria Corina Machado, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, recently summed it up: “We will bring rule of law. We will open markets. We will have security for foreign investment and a transparent massive privatisation program that is waiting for you.”
That’s the “peace on Earth” that Trump, and apparently the Nobel committee, desire: a fire sale of public assets to predatory US companies, and a government pliant to Western corporate and geopolitical interests.
Many questions remain unanswered. The role of the Venezuelan military looms large. Its top echelons are deeply integrated into the Venezuelan capitalist class, running important sections of the economy. Along with Venezuela’s large military budget, this has underpinned their loyalty to the government for many years. It is unclear how the leading generals will respond to Maduro’s ouster, but voluntarily handing over their control of the world’s largest oil reserves seems unlikely.
There are more questions. Will the opposition unite around a clear program and person? It’s impossible to know, but the more moderate sections are not unanimous in supporting US intervention. How much of this is driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose political career has been animated by an almost manic desire for regime change in Venezuela and Cuba? 
What political impact will this have domestically in the US and on Trump’s MAGA movement? The legacies of Iraq and Afghanistan left a section of Trump’s base strongly opposed to regime change operations. It is notable that the few statements by Trump and Rubio have framed the actions as a “law enforcement” operation to bring a “criminal” drug trafficker to justice. 
Most important of all, how does the Venezuelan population respond? Having turned the country into a corrupt, authoritarian state stalked by poverty weakened the strong support Chavez enjoyed, but the Venezuelan population also has a long history of opposing US imperialism. Many understand that Washington’s crippling sanctions regime has been a key source of economic misery in the country. They know that Washington will only plunder them further.
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, the ouster of Maduro marks a step towards greater, and more naked, imperialist aggression. After Israel’s genocide in Gaza, there now appears little need for even the pretence of international law. Might makes right is the guiding ethos of US imperialism. There will be no peace until the empire falls.

US gangster regime kidnaps Venezuelan president

Emma Dynes

When Australian workers took on the American war machine

US President Donald Trump’s recent announcement that the US might resume nuclear weapons testing should be a wake-up call. Only North Korea has tested nuclear weapons this century; no major imperial power has done so since France ended an atomic weapons testing program in the South Pacific in January 1996. 
French President Jacques Chirac’s announcement, in June 1995, that his government planned to conduct eight nuclear tests at Mururoa, ending a four-year moratorium, provoked a storm of global protest. Mururoa and its sister atoll Fangataufa, both part of French Polynesia, were subject to a barrage of nearly 200 nuclear tests between 1966 and 1996. Up until 1974, these were atmospheric tests that dispersed radioactive fallout across the South Pacific, including in Fiji, the Cook Islands, Niue, New Zealand, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga and Tuvalu, according to a 1998 <a href="https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1028_web.pdf">report</a>
by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
French nuclear testing followed a secret program of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/70-years-operation-hurricane-shameful-history-british-nuclear-tests-australia">British nuclear testing in Australia</a>, at the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia, and at Emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia, between 1952 and 1963. Concurrently, between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/">nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands</a>, exposing 52,000 Marshallese to unsafe levels of radiation.
The largest and most militant protests against the 1995 resumption of French nuclear testing took place in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia in Tahiti, where indigenous Māʼohi have long demanded independence from France. In Australia, high school students were at the forefront of a wave of protests, including the largest high school walkout since the Vietnam War. 
Soon after Chirac’s June 1995 announcement, Brisbane anti-nuclear campaigners resolved to organise a 5pm protest in King George Square on each day that the French exploded a nuclear bomb at Mururoa. The first protest occurred on 6 September, following the detonation of an 8-kiloton bomb under Mururoa Atoll. 
Protesters condemned the hypocrisy of Paul Keating’s Labor federal government, which opposed the tests but refused to ban the export of uranium to France or to support Polynesian demands for independence. Among the participants were year 11 students from Aspley High School, Leela Cosgrove, Natalie Chapman and Erin Dunn. In an <a href="https://humanparts.medium.com/i-was-greta-thunberg-625829bb7814">essay</a>
published at Medium, Cosgrove explains:
“The protest we attended made us believe that maybe there were other people who cared and wanted change. We thought this experience might be valuable for other students. So, when we returned to school, my friend Erin and I asked to share an update on local protests at our school assembly.”
Aspley High School principal Ian Isaacs not only rejected their request but also gave both students a stern lecture about how “inappropriate” it was for them as high school students to be involved in politics. Isaacs patronisingly demanded to know, “Who put you up to this?” Incensed by the accusation that they had been brainwashed, Cosgrove and Dunn decided to lead a mass student walkout.
The plan was to walk out of school on the following Friday, 8 September, at the beginning of the next whole-of-school assembly. Cosgrove <a href="https://humanparts.medium.com/i-was-greta-thunberg-625829bb7814">recalls</a>
their intention was “to protest both the French nuclear weapons testing, but also to demonstrate to the administration that even though we were teenagers ... we were still political beings with an environmental and social conscience”.
The protest, however, did not go to plan. Instead of entering the school hall from the front door, Isaacs entered from the back, stood on a chair and yelled at students that they should have followed the “right channels”. When students attempted to walk out through the front doors of the hall, they found themselves locked in. In all, ten students defied school authorities and walked out that day. Isaacs promptly informed their parents that the students were suspended for a week. However, Brisbane’s daily newspaper, the Courier Mail, had sent journalists to the school looking for a story and the news soon broke. The students’ suspension became front page news.
When the second bomb was detonated at Fangataufa atoll on 2 October, the socialist youth organisation Resistance <a href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/206/news/45-brisbane-schools-walk-out-against-nuclear-testing">called for</a> a mass walkout of state school students on 5 October. The call came in support of an initiative by students at St Rita’s College to hold a rally in King George Square that day. The message was amplified by a Courier Mail
front-page headline: “Youth group calls for mass walkout at schools”.
In a vain attempt to divide the high school movement, Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley invited a select group of students from St Rita’s and several other elite private high schools to join him at a Brisbane City Hall meeting on 5 October to voice polite opposition to the nuclear weapons tests. The mayor’s office told the media that security guards would prevent Resistance members from “gatecrashing” the City Hall meeting. 
Unperturbed by threats of suspension, thousands of students from 45 high schools heeded Resistance’s call and rallied in King George Square on 5 October. The square had been the site of many militant protests in the 1970s and 1980s, when Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen imposed a ban on marches. <a href="https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/remembering-brisbanes-big-march--its-still-a-simple-case-of-freedom,10695">According to</a> historian Glenn Davies:
“King George Square was the crucible for the city’s social disquiet and ferment, where thousands of protesters once risked the batons of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s police force, over issues as diverse as the Vietnam War, the Springbok rugby tour, Aboriginal issues, nuclear disarmament and the right to protest. When the protesters went to walk out of the square, there would be hundreds and hundreds of police in military ranks to stop the marchers. As people tried to step out onto the roadway, they’d be strong-armed to the ground by police who would try to push them back into the square.”
In 1989, 32 years of National Party rule came to an end with the election of Wayne Goss’ Labor government. Mayor Jim Soorley, a key ally of Goss, was determined to return a semblance of order to Brisbane’s city streets. However, the high school protest was anything but “orderly”. One student, Jaay Taylor, captured the mood when he told the cheering crowd, “Pigs can fly, kids don’t have sex and nuclear testing is safe ... not!” Another exposed his bum on stage, declaring, “This is a message for Jacques Chirac!”
When reports were received that security guards at the entrance of the adjoining City Hall were confiscating Resistance placards, leaflets and badges from students trying to enter, the crowd marched towards City Hall chanting, “Join us, join us!” A few students managed to get inside and called on their peers to come outside and join the rally. Hundreds poured out of the building, joining 4,000 angry students in King George Square. The students marched defiantly on (or rather ran towards) the French consulate, chanting, “Burn the flag, burn the building!”, according to a Green Left Weekly <a href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/206/news/45-brisbane-schools-walk-out-against-nuclear-testing">report</a>.
When they got there, one student told the crowd that she had smuggled a Resistance placard into City Hall and held it high every time they red-baited Resistance. “They did not mention independence for Tahiti in City Hall”, she said. “They did not mention uranium sales to France. They just kept chanting, ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance’. This is not all we are saying. I’m a member of Resistance and I am saying let’s fight nuclear testing.”
The Courier Mail, however, was not going to let Resistance gain any glory from the protests’ success. Five days later, after planning had begun for another student walkout, the Courier Mail ran an article <a href="https://humanparts.medium.com/i-was-greta-thunberg-625829bb7814">claiming</a>
that six Aspley students had confessed to being “duped” by Resistance. All of the students had faced intense pressure to distance themselves from the socialist youth group, not only from their school administration, but also from the father of two of the students, who was a federal police officer.
The Courier Mail’s hit piece formed part of a hysterical red-scare campaign by Queensland politicians and the media. <a href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/207/news/who-really-manipulated-students-aspley">Reports</a>
filtered in that Resistance members were being hauled into the principal’s office for questioning, and Resistance badges were banned on school grounds. Among those leading the charge against Resistance was, shamefully, Ian Mackie, the president of the Queensland Teachers Union.
Nonetheless, the Brisbane protest spurred organising efforts by high school students across the country, with new coalitions being established. Working with these coalitions, Resistance called for a week of action leading up to the third nuclear test at Mururoa, on 28 October. <a href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/209/news/high-school-students-take-action-against-nuclear-tests">According to</a> Green Left Weekly, 2,000 students from more than 35 high schools took part in protests in Sydney on 25 October, with some students having to scale school gates to get to the rally. Twenty-seven Sydney students were suspended for their participation. In Canberra, 1,000 students reportedly walked out of school on the same day, with 250 rallying in Garema Place. Hundreds of students also took part in rallies in Melbourne and Perth.
The 1995 wave of student revolt had followed dedicated organising among high school students in the early 1990s under the umbrella of the Environmental Youth Alliance. The efforts led to sizeable World Environment Day rallies demanding action on climate change. Brisbane high school students were also at the forefront of another wave of student walkouts in 1998 to protest against Pauline Hanson after she formed the racist One Nation party to contest the coming federal election.
The French nuclear testing protests also drew on the legacy of a strong anti-nuclear campaign in Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which had opposed US bases in Australia, visits by nuclear-armed US ships to Australian ports and <a href="https://commonslibrary.org/leave-it-in-the-ground-union-bans-and-uranium-exports-in-the-1970s/">uranium mining</a>. In 1983, the incoming Labor government had pledged to end uranium mining, but reneged on its promise, allowing three mines to operate. 
Today, Australia remains among the top four exporters of uranium globally, principally exporting to Canada, the US and the European Union. The lion’s share of this uranium comes from the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, which contains <a href="https://www.ga.gov.au/digital-publication/aecr2023/uranium-and-thorium">the world’s largest deposit of uranium ore</a>. Although the Australian government claims that all exports are to countries that have signed bilateral safeguards agreements, “these [agreements] are self-regulated and the checks and balances are remarkably cursory”, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/not-here-not-us-long-fight-against-nuclear-australia">according to</a> Dave Sweeney, co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
The renewed threat of nuclear weapons testing, and the AUKUS plan to service US nuclear-powered submarines in Australian shipyards (and eventually to build them here), requires a new campaign to end the mining and export of Australian uranium once and for all, and to remove Australia from the nuclear fuel cycle. 
The high school walkouts 30 years ago provide an inspiring example of young people taking a stand to safeguard their future.

Nick Everett

When Australian high school students walked out against nuclear testing

“We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” These were the words US President Donald Trump used in his inauguration address in January to declare a new phase in the second Space Race. By invoking Manifest Destiny—the ideology of the colonisation of North America and genocide of the indigenous population—Trump is staking out the US’s claim over space against its rivals.
Trump’s second presidency has dramatically shifted towards the increased militarisation of space. The budget for the Space Force, a section of the US military under the Air Force established by Trump in his first term, increased by more than US$11 billion to almost US$40 billion this fiscal year. This is part of a US$113 billion increase in the overall military budget to more than US$1 trillion, which a White House <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf">budget summary document</a> says is in part to “revive the warrior ethos of America’s Armed Forces”.
Even ostensibly civilian agencies like NASA are being drawn in. As with many other areas of government spending, Trump has savagely cut NASA’s budget—except in areas relevant to waging war. Almost everything else has had its funding eviscerated: funding for climate science has been cut in half, astrophysics by two-thirds, and public engagement is entirely gone.
Among the flurry of executive orders Trump signed at the beginning of his second term was one directing the Department of Defense to begin development of what would come to be known as the Golden Dome. This would be a network of projectile detection and interception infrastructure designed to destroy inbound missile attacks, much like Israel’s infamous Iron Dome and already existing anti-missile systems operated by the US military. Unlike the Iron Dome, the Golden Dome will not be based on the ground, but in Earth orbit.
In reality, it will be less of a dome and more of a sphere made up of thousands of satellites sweeping across the sky above anywhere and everywhere on the planet. The satellites will be equipped with advanced rockets, lasers or particle beams designed to destroy nuclear warhead-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as soon as they’re launched by enemies of the US empire, instead of later on in their flight path.
The idea isn’t new. An orbital missile “defence” system was first proposed in 1983 by then-US President Ronald Reagan in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars”, but it was never realised. Now technology has advanced such that the prospect of American weapons literally hanging over all of our heads at all times is within reach.
Our planet’s orbit has been used for waging war for decades already. The US has had secret surveillance satellites collecting imagery of the Earth’s surface since as early as 1960, only two years after the first American satellite of any kind was put in orbit. Since then, satellite images have been extremely valuable intelligence for American wars around the world. Images from American satellites were shared with Israel as it executed its genocidal campaign of destruction in Gaza over the last two years.
The National Reconnaissance Office, the US’s secretive department for space-based surveillance, has been working on putting potentially over a hundred satellites in orbit that can see the same level of detail as the Hubble Space Telescope—the difference is that these spy satellites are pointed down at us instead of out into space. The cherry on top of this global panopticon is the involvement of Elon Musk and his company SpaceX, which provides orbital communications for the US military through its Starshield satellite constellation.
The militarisation of space is not uniquely American. Ever since the end of World War Two, the conquest of space has been seen as a vital element of global imperial domination.
Space Race One, between the US and USSR at the height of the Cold War, has been mythologised as a competition of exploration, culminating in putting humans on the moon and returning them safely home. The reality is that it was an intense arms race with a simple logic: if you can land a rocket carrying people on the moon, you can also land an ICBM carrying a nuclear warhead on your enemy.
Space Race Two is between the US and China. Both have plans to put humans on the moon in the next decade and have their sights set on even more distant landings. If they come to fruition, we will likely see humans walk on an extraterrestrial body again soon. But the main factor motivating these excursions to far-flung places is not so much the places themselves, but how they help the imperialist powers better dominate Earth.
China has its own constellation of intelligence-gathering satellites, and has also been developing its capabilities for space-based warfare. In January 2007, China flexed its muscles by successfully destroying one of its own satellites with a missile launched from the ground. The South China Morning Post <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3327224/china-fields-golden-dome-prototype">reported</a>
in September that China has an operational prototype of a missile “defence” system similar to the proposed Golden Dome.
That there may be not only one but two planet-engulfing machines of observation and destruction is terrifying. It foreshadows how much deadlier an all-out war between the US and China would be than any previous war. Governments in all of the most powerful countries are dragging us towards such a conflagration with their <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/world-military-spending-explodes">exploding military budgets</a>. The drive to war must be opposed wherever it happens: sea, land, sky or above.

Danica Rachel

Trump’s final frontier of warfare

Pass the sick bucket! You might have predicted that Anthony Albanese’s first White House meeting with Donald Trump would be bad, but it exceeded the worst expectations. 
What made the whole thing so dreadful?
Was it Albanese fawning over Trump and congratulating him for “the extraordinary achievement” of a ceasefire deal in Gaza, even as Israel continues to kill dozens of Palestinians daily with US-made weapons?
Was it Albanese hailing the countries’ military record, claiming the two had “stood side by side for freedom and democracy”? Did that include Vietnam, Anthony? Iraq? Afghanistan? Did that record include Australian and US backing for dictators across the Asia Pacific even as they murdered their citizens? Or their support for Israel as it wages its genocidal war in Gaza? 
Or was the biggest problem Albanese spitting in the faces of the 7 million Americans who had taken to the streets three days earlier in the “No Kings” protests against the right-wing authoritarian Trump regime?
It’s hard to pick which one of these is most offensive.
But that’s not how the national media saw things. 
There, it was celebration all around. The mainstream media praised Albanese to the skies for his achievements where other world leaders had failed. The prime minister had got into the good graces of the president and brought home the bacon. Trump had even called Albanese “a great prime minister”. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Koziol called Albanese’s trip “a raging success”. Opposition leader Sussan Ley initially tried to make ground by demanding Albanese sack Australian ambassador Kevin Rudd for disrespecting Trump, but within 24 hours she too was forced to join in the establishment’s hurrahs.
But what was it that they were celebrating? Nothing other than Albanese walking into the White House and coming out with an agreed plan to take the world closer to war.
Albanese and the Australian ruling class, and the capitalist media that fight for their interests, wanted two things out of this meeting: to get Trump to openly support the delivery of AUKUS nuclear submarines to Australia, and to confirm US involvement in mining and processing Australia’s extensive deposits of rare earths and critical minerals. They got both. 
China’s emergence as a rival hegemon in the Asia-Pacific threatens US domination and, by extension, Australian power. Dealing with the threat from China is now central to American imperialist concerns. But the US is also involved elsewhere, from the Middle East and Latin America to Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Australian government wants the US to prioritise the Asia Pacific to ensure China is prevented from controlling the region. Their job, therefore, is to tie America down in the region and to reinforce in the eyes of successive US presidents Australia’s value as an ally.
This is what the AUKUS pact is about, to convince the US (and Britain) to sell nuclear attack submarines to Australia with delivery to start in 2032 and, eventually, to build some in Australia. Their only purpose is to project Australian power into the South China Sea, the most likely arena for a clash with China, and to integrate Australia into US war plans. 
The cost of the submarines is already estimated at $368 billion, and given the whole history of military procurement, we can anticipate the final figure will be much higher. In the meantime, the Albanese government is paying $3 billion to US shipyards and $20 billion to build port facilities in WA to service the US nuclear submarine fleet. The cost to humanity if the submarines are deployed in a war with China will be incalculable.
Before this week’s meeting, Trump had, from the perspective of Australia’s ruling class, been disconcertingly silent about AUKUS. What’s more, he had sponsored a review of the whole program, to report by the end of this year. So, when Trump told the joint press conference that it was “full steam ahead” with the AUKUS program, there were whoops of joy from Australia’s defence and security establishment. They can keep banging the war drums. Tick one for Albanese.
Then there was the issue of rare earths and critical minerals which are an essential component in the production of a wide range of products, civilian and military. Over the past two or three decades, the Chinese government has invested huge amounts of money in securing for Beijing a virtual monopoly in processing these minerals. Two weeks ago, as part of the escalating tensions with Washington, China announced export controls, confirming US fears that China could cripple America’s military preparations. 
Enter the Albanese government. Over the past five months, Canberra has been working with Washington to expand the extraction and processing of Australia’s rare earth deposits as an alternative source of supply for the Pentagon. 
This week’s meeting saw Albanese and Trump sign off on an agreement to invest in or subsidise up to $8.5 billion into the industry to get things moving. This comes on top of $2 billion of public money paid or committed to two mines in the NT and WA, one of which is backed by Trump’s second favourite Australian, Gina Rinehart. The industry will be guaranteed a minimum price level to ensure the mine owners rake in profits. According to the White House, the agreement will achieve “critical mineral and energy dominance”, with Australia and the US having first pick of the minerals and control over exports, allowing Canberra and Washington to reward friends and punish enemies. Tick two for Albanese.
That the nation’s politicians with few exceptions, foreign and military policy strategists, military chiefs of staff and newspaper editors can all cheer Albanese on for a splendid job in Washington tells us a lot about their priorities. They are cheering for an escalation of war planning in our region, for the diversion of funds from social services, education, health and welfare to military build-up, and for a more repressive environment that comes with such developments. And all in the hands of our Labor government, which is demonstrating once again its devotion to the interests of the ruling class.

Tom Bramble

Albanese visits Washington in the service of imperialism and war

It’s no secret that Australian universities are increasingly enmeshed with the defence sector and weapons companies. Now, TAFEs are being tuned up to serve Australian imperialism and the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. 
A recent federal government announcement of a $28 million National Security TAFE Centre of Excellence in Adelaide illustrates the trend. The facility boasts “state-of-the-art equipment” to help apprentices develop artificial intelligence and robotics skills. According to the South Australian government, it will be central to fulfilling Australia’s “national security needs”. What this actually means is training young people to build weapons of war and destruction. 
Another example is a recent advertising blitz by Roger Cook’s Labor government in Western Australia. The premier says that, as the country becomes increasingly tied to the US and UK military industrial bases, Western Australia “will play a central role” in building Australia’s military capacities. The state Labor government is spending $11.5 million on an AUKUS Defence Industry Incentive to provide handouts to military corporations and contractors to expand their workforces. 
In January, the state government invested another $14.6 million in a new WA Defence TAFE Centre of Excellence, which significantly expanded the number of military-related courses offered to meet the needs of the Henderson Defence precinct. The precinct, in the southern suburbs of Perth, will service and maintain nuclear submarines and employ 10,000 people. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced another $12 billion in extra funding for Henderson last month. 
Western Australia is key to AUKUS. In 2027, five nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK will begin rotating through the HMAS Stirling naval base at Garden Island, 5 km off the coast of the Perth metro area. One thousand US military personnel and their family members will soon be based there as well, making the city a potential target in any major imperialist conflict. 
Defence Minister Richard Marles has repeatedly stated that Australia needs to build a “strong and resilient industrial base” to meet the demands of AUKUS. More broadly, the Australian ruling class wants to assert its regional power with a beefed-up military. To achieve this, the plan is to reshape attitudes and sections of the education system to cater to the needs of AUKUS. Strengthening Australian ties to the US military is central to this. 
The normalisation of militarism is also occurring in primary and secondary schools. A 2022 publication, Minors and Missiles, by the Medical Association for Prevention of War, reported an increasing trend for school STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programs being tied to weapons companies, and that the Department of Defence is the lead agency in half of all national STEM initiatives.
This is only the beginning, and none of it is in the interests of working-class students. While governments spend millions of dollars building new military-oriented TAFE programs, they neglect systemic problems in the TAFE system (such as poverty wages for apprentices, old and outdated facilities, and underpaid teachers and staff) and refuse to do anything substantive to address the key issue of economic security facing young people—the housing crisis. 
Instead of militarising our TAFE sector, students should be offered courses to help make the world a better place, not ones geared towards building weapons of mass destruction.

Ella Marchionda

The militarisation of TAFE

The term “new world order” (not the conspiracy version) generally refers to a major shift in world politics, in which the old economic, political and social structures are reshaped to fit the demands of a new era. 2025 is shaping up to produce precisely this—a more violent, authoritarian, hierarchical alternative.
The United States under Donald Trump’s regime is the prime case in point. Trump has unleashed ICE agents pumped up on unbridled power, deployed National Guard troops to the streets of major cities, weaponised the Department of Justice against his personal enemies, enacted the largest cuts to health care in US history, attempted to scrub trans people from public life, imposed steep tariffs on dozens of countries, rebranded the Department of Defense the Department of War and much more. It is possibly the most rapid political transformation the world has ever seen outside of a major war.
But it’s not just the United States. The far right is in power in Italy, Hungary and Finland, is the main opposition party in France, Germany, Portugal, Austria and Belgium, and is an established part of the political furniture everywhere else. In the United Kingdom, polls indicate that Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK would win a general election if it was held today. 
The situation is admittedly less severe in Australia, although there is clearly a coterie of wannabe führers waiting in the wings, from the ragtag group of March for Australia organisers to One Nation’s Pauline Hanson (who is rising in the polls) and Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Politics is happening at a much faster rate than normal. A major new policy or directive is announced almost every day in the United States alone. Trump’s fascist former chief strategist Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone”: a deliberate strategy of overwhelming the media and public with a constant barrage of announcements and controversies, making it difficult to focus on any single issue or broader strategy. It’s like being punched repeatedly in the face so badly that it’s impossible to string together a coherent thought or exit strategy.
But there is a method amongst the madness. Conservatism is driven by a reverence for capitalism and its foundational inequalities between the rich and the poor. They rule over us on a macro level by wielding state power, and on a micro level in every workplace. Conservative ideologies are derived as a defence of this status quo. That is why they so strongly venerate hierarchies in all social spaces—bosses rule over workers in the economy, powerful countries rule over the weak geopolitically and men rule over women in the home. One of the best ways of naturalising a historically specific social phenomenon is by reproducing it in all walks of life, thus making it feel eternal. 
Capitalism is also an extraordinarily violent society, from the everyday violence of poverty through to the violence of the police and imperialist war. Conservatives, again, venerate this state of being—there’s the stereotypical tough guy protecting his weak, fragile woman; the ICE agent bashing down doors and pelting with rubber bullets anyone who tries to get in his (occasionally her) way; and the warped world of the UFC.
You might have noticed I’m talking about conservatives, rather than singling out the far right. The latter exist in the world of the former, and the lines between traditional conservatives and the new far right are murky. There’s a tendency to look at the conservatives of yesterday (pre-Trump) as though they were more palatable (pretty outrageous if you’re old enough to remember George Bush, the butcher of the Middle East). 
While it’s the case that some modern far-right parties and leaders were previously fascists on the margins, there’s also a general shift within conservatism further to the right—like the Republicans of old who have fallen in behind Trump. There’s also a through line between the generations, brilliantly depicted in Ali Abbasi and Gabriel Sherman’s 2024 film The Apprentice, which chronicled how Donald Trump was mentored and moulded by conservative lawyer Roy Cohn, who famously prosecuted the Rosenbergs during the height of McCarthyism.
Conservatism is shifting in this direction because of a series of political, social and economic ruptures that have engulfed the globe over the last fifteen years. Every period of capitalist crisis has produced a new political form as the system tries to stabilise itself and adapt to new conditions. Out of the Great Depression and Second World War came an era of greater state intervention into the economy and increased social spending—all based on the new riches flowing from the postwar boom. The economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s produced the neoliberal era, as states and bosses privatised public assets, cut social welfare, intensified the exploitation of workers and opened the global South to even greater plunder.
The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 heralded a new, prolonged period of instability. The state bailed out the wealthy and paid for it through waves of austerity that slashed workers’ living standards. Consequently, the traditional parties of the political centre were discredited across much of Europe and took a beating in the US (hence Hillary Clinton’s failure and Trump’s ease in sweeping away the mainstream Republicans). Out of the ensuing polarisation emerged the far-right politics that dominate today, and waves of progressive social movements and new left-wing parties.
A series of further crises compounded all this. The COVID years produced a new anti-lockdown, anti-vax conspiratorial audience for the right and the radicalisation of billionaires like Elon Musk, and was followed by years of steep inflation. Catastrophic climate change is no longer a concern for the distant future, but a reality bearing down on the world right now. As temperatures keep rising, a new series of crises will emerge as millions—and then billions—are forced to relocate, supply chains break down and crops fail. Even as our rulers fail to act on any of this, they are no doubt anxious about what it will mean for their system in the future.
But the major global development is the rising imperialist conflict between China and the US and its Western allies. To put it simply, all things being equal, China is on track to overtake the United States economically, including in the most innovative high-tech industries. Economic might creates military might, and together they create global domination. That’s how the US rose to the top of the imperialist pecking order. This is a serious long-term crisis for the US ruling class, and every other country still betting on and benefiting from the Western alliance. 
The old order is no longer working for those who created it. Hence, a new world order is necessary. It’s impossible to understand anything about the political chaos of today without this context. 
Take Trump’s tariffs, which have been imposed on friends and foes alike, and decried by many as economic irrationalism. It’s an attempt to force companies to bring production back on shore. Why is this necessary? Here’s one pertinent example: shipbuilding has all but disappeared from the US, but naval power will be crucial in any future conflict in the Asia Pacific. There’s a method to the madness.
Then there’s the crackdown on undocumented migrants, who compose a key part of many low-wage US workforces. To prepare a civilian population for war is to imbue them with a vicious nationalism and hatred towards perceived foreign enemies. Endless headlines and speeches about “a war on US borders” and “illegal aliens invading the US” are part of that ideological conditioning.
There’s also the broader “war on woke”, which is a major offensive against the rights of the oppressed. Basic notions of fairness, equality, diversity and acceptance might be tolerated when the ruling class is trying to convince us that the entire world is fair and equal. But it’s antithetical to the conservative belief that “might is right”. 
It’s been obvious for years that the chaos of modern capitalism would produce a new (if partially reheated) form of politics. But 2025 has made that form a whole lot clearer. It includes rising militarism, the fortification of borders, state authoritarianism and the junking of progressive liberal values. To caveat this a little—it’s still early days, and we don’t have a crystal ball. But it would be wrong to ignore the reality unfolding around us. To change the world effectively, we must understand what is happening.
One counter to the notion that we’re living in a new world order is that it is purely a product of the Trumpified Republican Party and its international allies: if Trump is booted in three years, then this will all be over. There are a few things that suggest the situation is not so simple.
First is that when Joe Biden was president, he attempted to chart a different course. He used subsidies to entice industry to reshore, proposed a major spending package to rebuild America’s decaying infrastructure (both of which, it was argued, would create well-paying jobs to alleviate trashed living standards and social chaos), and imposed targeted tariffs on China and other adversaries, while putting serious effort into strengthening economic and political bonds with US allies. It too was a plan to strengthen US imperialism, but with more carrots and fewer sticks. It bombed. Much of the spending was blocked by Congress (including some Democrats) and the US capitalists made no serious attempt to discipline the detractors into supporting it. The “other way” failed.
Second, aspects of the new approach are being adopted by parties not of the right, most notably UK Labour, which has imposed a harsh new border policy, cut social spending, designated Palestine Action as a proscribed terrorist organisation (which has led to the arrest of thousands of supporters) and continued the Tories’ fight against trans people.
Third, the wheels Trump has set in motion will not necessarily just stop spinning when he leaves the White House. Some aspects of his program will probably be dropped, such as the open hostility to traditional allies. But some things can be so utterly transformed, or destroyed, that they are not easily reinstated. Take USAID: it could take years to rebuild the structures and networks of international aid distribution that have been obliterated by Trump, and there’s no certainty that any future administration would see this as a priority. Not to mention that we have no idea what will happen at the next election; Trump might seek an unconstitutional third term or successfully pass the crown to J.D. Vance. 
Finally, moments in which liberal centrism has stabilised in the past fifteen years have done nothing to stave off the radicalisation of conservatives and their quest for power. Joe Biden, after all, was followed by Trump 2.0 and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is warming the seat for Nigel Farage. 
More importantly, we should not desire to return to the old order. That one sucked too. It was an order in which Wall Street was bailed out while the poor were evicted, the US enforced its supremacy by dropping bombs on the Middle East, historic numbers of immigrants were deported and billionaires bought super yachts while millions went hungry. 
There is, however, another way, one that does not rely on bankrupt politicians and parties. We can instead look to the power of workers and the oppressed to fight the right, overthrow the billionaires and build a genuinely new world order based on equality and human liberation. 
There has been no shortage of mass struggles in recent years. More people protested in the 2010s than any other decade in human history. In just the last month, Gen Z protesters have overthrown governments in Nepal and Madagascar, and mobilised in Indonesia, Morocco, the Philippines, Timor-Leste and Peru.
And in the last few weeks, mass workers’ struggle has returned to the streets and workplaces of Europe, with the Italian general strike in solidarity with Palestine, a similar general strike scheduled for Spain and general strikes against austerity in France. 
The people are furious, and rightly so. What we need is a politics that can draw together all these struggles, direct them against the rich and powerful and fight for a socialist society that replaces hierarchy with equality and violence with peace.

Eleanor Morley

Are we living in a new world order?

An illegal invasion unleashes mass slaughter in the Middle East. Western leaders clamber to justify the horror. Those responsible commit untold war crimes but never face prosecution from spineless international courts. When the occupation finally ends, airstrikes, disease and malnutrition will be estimated to have killed a million people.
This is not 2023 in Gaza. It’s 2003 in Iraq. The perpetrators are not the openly fascistic ethno-state of Israel, but the “civilised” rulers of Britain, the US, Australia and others like them. 
The chief ideological <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blair-defends-war-on-iraq/">spokesperson</a>
and international defender of this massacre was Tony Blair, British Labour prime minister from 1997 to 2007, whose notorious <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/6/8/dodgy-dossier-haunts-blair">“dossiers”</a>
claimed the Iraqi government was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
While the US provided the main military force behind the invasion, Blair supplied troops, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36712735">false justifications</a>
and rhetorical ammunition. Twenty-two years later and still dripping in blood and complicity, this butcher of Iraq is returning to the Middle East to oversee a so-called peace process in Gaza.
US President Donald Trump’s “20-point peace plan” for Gaza—a document that Blair himself <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-02/leaked-document-reveals-details-of-trump-peace-plan/105839640">helped</a>
to develop—specifically designates a role for the former prime minister. Under the proposal, he will serve alongside the US president on a transitional body that overrides any Palestinian representation and indefinitely dictates the future of postwar Gaza.
Disturbingly, the White House <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70155nked7o">directs</a> this “Board of Peace” to “create modern and efficient governance that ... is conducive to attracting investment” into a low-tariff “special economic zone”. This is business shorthand for low wages, corporate handouts and violations of workplace rights.
Such a task could find no more enthusiastic enforcer than Blair. Indeed, Trump’s previous dystopian vision for a free-market Gaza “Riviera” first <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/06/tony-blair-think-tank-worked-trump-riviera-plan-for-gaza/">originated</a>
from the twisted hive mind of the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change”, one of the ex-Labour leader’s numerous think tanks and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37416855">consultancy</a> firms.
Well before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Blair government’s priority was “ensuring British companies benefit from any post-war reconstruction contracts,” as was <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/in-lead-up-to-war-u-k-officials-and-businesses-planned-on-dividing-the-spo">revealed</a>
in a 2002 telegram brazenly entitled “Iraq: Dividing the Spoils”.
Blair’s appointment is a deliberate message from the Trump administration that Western imperialism’s arch-criminals still reign supreme and that Gaza’s reconstruction will be pounced upon as a shameless profit-making exercise.
All this is familiar ground for Blair, whose ten years in government hinged on market deregulation and the privatisation of Britain’s public infrastructure. Upon losing power in 2007, Blair was immediately appointed as Middle East envoy by fellow warmonger George W. Bush, and turned his attention to merging his political responsibilities with private business ventures.
While serving in Jerusalem, Blair took up a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/jan/10/blairjpmorgan">part-time position</a> as senior adviser with investment bank JP Morgan, for which he quickly brokered a deal between the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government and Wataniya Mobile to establish a privately run cell network in the West Bank, according to UK current affairs program Dispatches.
Jacobin magazine <a href="https://jacobin.com/2017/09/the-ghoulish-post-politics-career-of-tony-blair">reported</a>
in 2017 that Blair had also used his connections as envoy to orchestrate the development of oil fields off Gaza’s shoreline under the aegis of the British Gas Group, another JP Morgan client.
All told, Blair has leveraged the political ties he developed as UK prime minister and peace envoy to win lucrative deals and amass a personal fortune of £60 million as of 2015, according to the Telegraph’s <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11670425/Revealed-Tony-Blair-worth-a-staggering-60m.html">analysis</a>.
And while he continues to <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/tony-blair-putin-cant-use-iraq-to-justify-ukraine-invasion/a-65037323">insist</a>
that invading Iraq was about spreading “democracy” to the Middle East, he’s had no qualms accepting <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/12/tony-blair-institute-continued-taking-money-from-saudi-arabia-after-khashoggi">sizeable donations</a> to his “Global Change” think tank from US-aligned dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/27/tony-blair-conflict-interests-middle-east">Gulf states</a>. He has long fostered personal and political ties with tyrants from Muammar <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/23/-sp-blair-gaddafi-letter-thanks-spy-cooperation-libya-uk-dissidents">Gaddafi</a>
to Hosni <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/02/tony-blair-mubarak-courageous-force-for-good-egypt">Mubarak</a>.
Whatever form Gaza’s postwar governance takes, this man’s involvement ensures Western and Israeli interests will be imposed on Palestinians as ruthlessly as decades of occupation and neoliberal ransacking were forced upon civilians in Iraq. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/09/29/tony-blair-gaza-strip/">Washington Post</a> last month, “the Israelis ... respect him”.
Tony Blair is an unindicted war criminal and foremost embodiment of rapacious capitalism. A gold-class seat in hell is waiting for him.

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