Israel’s military strikes against Iran are the latest evidence, if any more were needed, that the US and its proxies are rogue states.
Despite the US government’s earlier attempts to distance itself from Israel’s aggression, it is clear that Washington was in on it from the start. President Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Friday, US time, that he had spoken to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and knew “what’s going on”. The Financial Times on Saturday quoted “a person familiar with the situation” who indicated that the US had been informed of Israeli plans as early as Monday, “was in the know all along” and “raised no objection”. 
And so came another attack on another country and another people. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. The Zionist state is off the leash, again, promising to continue indefinitely its assault, all the while stocked with weapons and backed by a US carrier group in the Mediterranean and B-2 bombers in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. 
Netanyahu insists that Israel faces an existential threat from Tehran’s nuclear program. This flimsy pretext of “existential threats” has been trotted out again and again over the last twenty months to justify everything from the starvation of Gazan children to the flattening of hospitals and schools to terrorist attacks on Hezbollah members to the bombings of Lebanon and Syria to the ever-greater annexation of West Bank territory.
Like its cousin charge of “antisemitism”, which is casually levelled against even the mildest critics of apartheid, anything in the Middle East capable of sneezing in the direction of Tel Aviv is labelled an “existential threat” to the nuclear-armed, US-backed Israeli state. 
Whatever Netanyahu might claim, Tehran is considered enemy number one not because of its military capacities, but because of its recalcitrance. Iran is perpetually in the crosshairs of the US and Israel because no other country in the Middle East bends less to Washington’s will. 
Iran has been demonised, harassed and sanctioned ever since the Western-backed torture state of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979. Washington and London more than tolerated the horrors of Pahlavi’s regime. The two Western governments had conspired, in 1953’s “Operation Ajax”, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, which had nationalised the oil industry two years earlier.
“Since Venezuela and the Middle East are the only sources from which the free world’s import requirements for petroleum can be supplied, these sources are necessary to continue the present economic and military efforts of the free world”, noted <a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v01p2/d159">a joint departmental report</a> to the US National Security Council eight months before the coup. “It therefore follows that nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world.”
Torture states are acceptable if they serve Western interests. So Pahlavi was installed to prevent popular aspirations from being realised and to ensure that Western companies could again exploit the country’s oil wealth. That is, he was brought in to rule with an iron fist. It went swimmingly for the oil companies and for US Middle Eastern strategy until the Iranian population rose from the dungeons to reclaim their country.
But miraculously, after 1979, the West suddenly became deeply concerned about the human rights record of the Iranian government. Washington and Israel have repeatedly declared it a rogue state and a threat to peace ever since.
The US was so concerned with regional peace that it funded Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, supplying President Saddam Hussein’s regime with weapons and intelligence. Several hundred thousand Iranians were killed during the war. The US also helped the Iraqis launch chemical weapons attacks. 
“[S]enior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks [in 1988]”, Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid wrote in <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/">an exclusive investigation</a> for Foreign Policy journal in 2013. “They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.”
Unlike Israel, Iraq was no solid ally of the US. After he had done the work against Iran, Hussein fell out of favour with Washington. The US invaded in the first Gulf War (1990-91) before imposing sanctions that were responsible for killing an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Questioned about this horror in 1996, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1T5JRVR53Eo">US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded</a>: “We think the price is worth it”. 
Then the US invaded again in 2003 after lying about Hussein’s regime, which, the Americans said, possessed weapons of mass destruction, was sponsoring terrorism and was an imminent threat to regional and even world peace. To keep the peace, US destroyed the country, left <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html">hundreds of thousands dead</a> in the first few years of the occupation, and created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State.
This criminal history isn’t deemed relevant to contemporary reporting of Israel’s attack on Iran. It’s scandalous, but of little surprise, that the media today is parroting the US and Israeli line when both countries have, in recent history, persistently lied, persistently invaded other countries, persistently supported dictatorial regimes, and persistently killed masses of people throughout the region. 
No doubt, the Iranian regime is despotic. It will be a welcome day when Iranian workers overthrow it. But any honest accounting of the last several decades in the Middle East shows the US and Israel to be partners in a criminality that throws shade on Tehran’s record.
It should go without saying that Israel’s aggression, backed again by the US, should be opposed. With its Gaza genocide, assaults in the West Bank, occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territory and the latest attack on Iran, the Zionist state is attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East—a redrawing most favourable to fascists and dictators aligned with one of the greatest purveyors of violence in history.

Editors

Rogue empire

Starving Palestinians forced to walk kilometres under scorching heat in a desperate search for food are crowded into metal cages. Drone broadcasts direct civilians to aid distribution points, where Israeli forces open fire on them. The situation is so desperate that many decide to brave the gunfire and attempt to gather food for their families.
“People fought over five pallets. They told us to take food—then they fired from every direction”, Mansour Sami Abdi, a father of four, <a href="https://msf.org.au/article/project-news/gaza-dozens-massacred-us-israel-backed-food-distribution-sites">told Doctors without Borders</a>, a humanitarian organisation, earlier this week. “I ran 200 metres before realising I’d been shot. This isn’t aid, it’s a lie.”
Massacres occur almost daily. On 1 June, at least 30 Palestinians were murdered like this. On 3 June, there were another 27. Who can now deny that Israel is waging a war of extermination? As the horrific results of the Zionist state’s project are laid bare, the collaborators—politicians, media organisations and “respectable” capitalist institutions—are searching for alibis. 
Last month, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada for the first time <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-from-the-leaders-of-the-united-kingdom-france-and-canada-on-the-situation-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank">issued a joint statement</a> criticising Israel’s “disproportionate” escalation in Gaza. The asymmetry has been discovered just 600 days into a “war” between one of the world’s best-equipped militaries and a starved civilian population. They should not be allowed to feign ignorance. The architects of these crimes could hardly have been clearer in their intentions. 
At the invasion’s outset, Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze5w2wd4x0o">wrote on X</a>: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. Two days after 7 October, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “<a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/we-are-fighting-human-animals-dehumanization-of-palestinians/">fighting human animals</a>” as he announced a complete siege of the territory.
“It’s time to kiss doomsday”, Israeli MP Revital Gotliv wrote, also on X. “Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza ... with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!” 
Ariel Kallner, another member of parliament, wrote: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suddenly finds distasteful the use of starvation as a weapon of war. On 26 May, he told a press conference: “It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need”. But UNICEF began warning that all children under five were at risk of death from starvation in December 2023. And Israel has blockaded Gaza for almost twenty months. 
Albanese knew exactly what Israel’s endgame was when he refused to criticise US President Donald Trump’s plan for forced relocation back in February. “I’m not going to have a running commentary on statements by the president of the United States”, is all he had to say. Foreign Minister Penny Wong knew that access to food and water in Gaza had been cut off when she said on 10 October 2023: “I think it’s always very difficult from over here to make judgements about what security approach other countries take”. 
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent statement that he “no longer understands” what Israel is doing has been <a href="https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/27/no-longer-comprehensible-german-chancellor-slams-israels-gaza-strikes/">hyped in some quarters</a> as an “unprecedented criticism of Israel’s Gaza operations”. But, like the rest of the world, Merz does understand. He understood it in February when he invited Netanyahu to Berlin, promising to find a way around the prime minister’s <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu">International Criminal Court arrest warrant</a> for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He understood it last year, when his party approved €161 million (A$284 million) of arms shipments to Israel. The entire German establishment understood it as they closed ranks to have opponents of the genocide <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250304-german-ministry-dismisses-lawyer-for-supporting-gaza-rejecting-genocide/">fired</a>, <a href="https://hyphenonline.com/2024/10/04/ava-moayeri-germany-pro-palestine-protest-free-speech-police-arrest-violence/">raided, arrested</a> and <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-palestine-activists-deportation-state-repression">deported</a>. 
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy recently labelled Israel’s actions “abominable”. But he’s comfortable with UK-manufactured drones being used by the Israeli army. According to testimony from a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo">retired British surgeon</a>, those drones target and shoot children who survive air strikes. Palestine solidarity activists who attempted to disrupt drone production have been <a href="https://thebristolcable.org/2025/02/filton-18-palestine-action-activists-treated-like-terrorists-elbit-israeli-arms-factory-action/">arrested</a> by “counter-terrorism” police and are imprisoned awaiting prosecution by Lammy’s government. 
Politicians in the West have united to defend their states’ economic and political relationships with Israel, a vital ally for projecting their power and influence in the Middle East. This has been more important to them than the 2 million people whose lives have been devastated in the Gaza Strip. Now that they have proven their loyalty, now that the job is nearly done, now that nobody is standing in Israel’s way, these politicians want to wash their hands of the inevitable results. 
For the same reason, a slight shift is occurring in media coverage. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post publishes <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/israel-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-genocide-2/">opinion pieces</a> decrying genocide. The BBC runs humanising stories on families decimated by Israeli airstrikes. Everyone, it seems, is starting to get the memo that a bit of equivocation and “balance” might be in order, if for no other reason than to begin scrubbing the stains from their reputations. 
But it doesn’t change the fact that corporate and state media outlets have spent 600 days acting as loyal agents for the Israeli military. They’ve treated Israeli accounts of events as facts, silenced dissenting voices and embedded their journalists with Israeli units to be taken on North Korea-style propaganda tours.
One of the most notorious examples occurred at the beginning of the war, when CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson accompanied the Israeli army to Gaza’s bombed-out al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. The network broadcast “evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives. Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari showed CNN a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas guards. “Every terrorist has his own shift”, Hagari told Robertson. 
The problem was that it wasn’t a Hamas roster—it was just an Arabic calendar. Despite the footage already being debunked by Arabic speakers and a protest being lodged by a Palestinian producer at the network, the lie was broadcast, giving the Israeli state cover for war crimes it may have committed at the hospital. 
The systematic bias against Palestinians and their supporters has been so overwhelming that many normally apolitical journalists at major news outlets—from American CNN to the BBC in Britain—have felt compelled to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/5/failing-gaza-pro-israel-bias-uncovered-behind-the-lens-of-western-media">blow the whistle</a>. In Australia, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/australias-abc-staffs-concerns-over-gaza-bias-revealed">journalists have complained</a> that editors have effectively banned the use of the word “Palestine” in reports.
It’s not until the damage is done that the rewriting of history begins. Wars that can no longer be defended are re-framed by their perpetrators as unforeseeable and unfortunate mishaps. 
During the US invasion of Vietnam, opponents of the war faced a solid wall of capitalist institutions committed to its prosecution. Intellectuals overwhelmingly supported the war as a defence of freedom against communist tyranny. University heads called the police on protesters targeting their defence ties. American journalists identified with the objectives of “their side”, repeated government justifications for war crimes and assisted in their cover-up. Anybody who stood against this consensus was slandered as a “communist sympathiser”.
When as many as 3 million Vietnamese were dead, the occupation collapsed and opponents of the war were proved right. Then the war was rewritten self-servingly as a “tragedy of good intentions”, a noble mission gone awry. 
It was similar with Iraq. Sponsors of the war falsified evidence to justify the invasion, and suppressed, monitored and smeared opponents. Then, when it all fell apart, they shrugged it off as an intelligence failure. Hillary Clinton brushed aside her support for the war during her first presidential bid, saying: “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way”.
As in Vietnam and Iraq, so now in Gaza. From the beginning, the left and the Palestine solidarity movement have argued that Israel’s aims are clear: an extension of their decades-long project of ethnic cleansing and expansion. From the beginning, we argued that if Israel wasn’t forced to stop, the war would end with the brutal forced depopulation of Gaza. For telling the truth, we were sacked, suspended, slandered and put on trial. 
Israel’s backers now admit the reality of this war, yet they continue to persecute those who oppose it. Now that our leaders mouth rhetorical criticisms, we should demand real action. 
All political prisoners who have been demonised as “terrorist sympathisers” and threats to “social cohesion” should be released. All bogus charges of antisemitism against anti-war and anti-racist activists should be withdrawn. 
States should impose real sanctions on Israel. The “sanctions” announced by the UK government are nothing of the sort, consisting of the pausing of free trade talks and travel bans on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/violent-israeli-settlers-under-uk-sanctions-join-west-bank-outpost">a handful of West Bank “settlers”</a>. The government will continue to send weapons and share intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza, assisting Israel in its targeting of civilians. 
As world leaders try to distance themselves from Israel’s crimes, we must continue to hold them accountable. They’ve been accomplices in this atrocity and implacable enemies of those who have tried to stop it. They must never be forgiven.

Luca Tavan

Western collaborators in genocide now scramble for alibis

For the second time, in spite of notoriously censorious defamation laws, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, has been confirmed to be a war criminal. After spectacularly losing a defamation case against Fairfax Media’s Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe in 2023, Roberts-Smith’s appeal, heard by a full bench of the Federal Court, went down in flames on 19 May. 
Central to the case was claims, now upheld twice to be substantially true, that Roberts-Smith committed war crimes during Australia’s occupation of Afghanistan. These crimes included kicking a man off a cliff and directing soldiers under his command to shoot him; murdering another man and encouraging other soldiers to drink alcohol from his prosthetic leg; and multiple instances of directing other soldiers to kill unarmed people.
In his repeated attempts to clear his name and punish his accusers for telling the truth, Roberts-Smith has succeeded only in proving more convincingly that he is, indeed, a war criminal. His arrogance is almost comical. He presents as a man who believes that he is untouchable. 
In 2021, Roberts-Smith fronted a court to explain why he had petrol-bombed hard drives in his backyard in 2018. This was after McKenzie broke the story that he was being investigated by the Australian Federal Police for war crimes. Roberts-Smith explained: “If you don’t get rid of a hard drive, all of the data on the hard drive ... can typically be pulled off it”. Indeed. These were the actions he was trying to paint as those of an innocent man.
At the time of the original defamation case, barrister Bruce McClintock deployed a foolproof defence in the mould of another war criminal, Bill Clinton: “My client did not drink from the leg”. Unfortunately for Ben Roberts-Smith, video footage has recently emerged which shows that he did, in fact, drink from the leg.
It doesn’t take a lot of digging to work out where Roberts-Smith’s self-righteous arrogance comes from. He likely believed he could get out of trouble, like so many private school boys before him, simply by asking the question “Do you know who my father is!?” His own dear papa being, of course, a former Supreme Court justice in Western Australia. 
He is also backed by a who’s who of Australia’s rich scumbags, from Seven Media’s Kerry Stokes—who funded Roberts-Smith’s original defamation case to the tune of $30 million and gave him an upper management job—through to MAGA mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who has sprung to his defence in recent weeks.
He expected the establishment to defend him. He assumed, not without reason, that anything goes in the pursuit of Western interests in the Middle East—that a culture of impunity is an important part of hyping up soldiers to commit the sort of atrocities that are part and parcel of carrying out military campaigns. Australia’s most decorated soldier has become a symbol of the hubris of an empire which gave itself the right to kill not just four innocent Afghans, but thousands upon thousands in the course of a nihilistic 20-year slaughter and occupation. 
If that wasn’t enough, Roberts-Smith is ostentatiously remorseless. In 2023, he posed for a photo at a beach club in Bali alongside Zachary Rolfe, the still-serving Queensland police officer who shot dead Aboriginal man Kumanjayi Walker in the remote Northern Territory town of Yuendumu in 2019. In the comments, Rolfe mockingly wrote “Just a couple of cops/murderers and war criminals Havin a lovely afternoon in the sun”.
Satisfying as it is to see Roberts-Smith lose again, the reality is that he is walking away with a slap on the wrist. Despite twice being found, on the balance of probabilities, to have committed war crimes, he is not rotting in a cell, nor lying dead at the bottom of a cliff like one of his victims. Instead, he continues to wear his Victoria Cross—Australia’s highest military decoration—proudly on his chest. He was spotted doing so only a month ago, at Perth’s ANZAC Day dawn service. 
His uniform continues to be displayed in Canberra’s War Memorial, alongside a story of his award-winning “gallantry” in Afghanistan. Only now, it has a mealy-mouthed disclaimer: “In June 2023 a Federal Court judge determined that there was ‘substantial truth’ to the allegations that Roberts-Smith had been involved and complicit in unlawful killings in Afghanistan”. It goes on to remind us, “Roberts-Smith has appealed this decision. Roberts-Smith has not been charged with any offence under criminal law”. 
The Brereton report, which was commissioned in response to news of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan surfacing, has been similarly toothless. Despite finding evidence of 39 “unlawful killings” perpetrated or participated in by 25 special forces soldiers, not one has been convicted of a crime. Only one, former SAS soldier Oliver Schulz, has faced charges. Naturally, the report stopped short entirely of laying any blame at the feet of the generals and ministers who were ultimately responsible for the war. 
By contrast, former army lawyer David McBride, who leaked documents about the conduct of Australian troops in Afghanistan to the ABC in 2016, languishes in prison, serving a five-year sentence. Like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning before him, for the simple crime of telling the truth, McBride has faced far harsher consequences than any of the murderers in the ranks of the Australian army. 
Astoundingly, Roberts-Smith has indicated he will be launching a second appeal, this time to the High Court, presumably bankrolled by Gina Rinehart. Despite all the legal professionals who have so far deemed him a war criminal, he obviously thinks there is a chance of winning and getting revenge on those who dared bring his crimes to light. 
Real justice won’t be served until Roberts-Smith, and every murderous general, politician and media baron who enabled and decorated him, is locked up.

Jack Mansell

Ben Roberts-Smith reminds us he is a war criminal

Global military spending is skyrocketing. The total spent on waging or preparing for war in 2024 was about US$2.7 trillion, 9.4 percent more in real terms than in 2023, according to <a href="https://www.sipri.org/publications/2025/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2024">the latest Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates</a>. This is the biggest year-on-year increase since the institute began tracking world military expenditure in 1988.
The United States remains the world’s biggest spender, outlaying US$997 billion and accounting for 37 percent of the global total. China was a distant second, spending an estimated US$314 billion. The top five spenders (including Russia, Germany and India) account for 60 percent of the global total. The top fifteen countries, Australia included, all increased military spending and made up four-fifths of the global total, spending a combined US$2.1 trillion in 2024.
The spending growth is part of a longer-term trend. Last year was the tenth consecutive year of increases in global military expenditures, the total being 37 percent higher in real terms than in 2015.

<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/military-spending-soars-to-2-7-trillion.png" alt="" /></figure>
While US military spending is more than triple that of China, Beijing’s ten-year real increase is nearly 60 percent, about triple America’s 19 percent. As tensions increase between the two biggest powers, other countries are marching in lockstep to hold their ground.
This includes Australia, where uncompromising allegiance to the US has been central policy for Labor and Liberal governments for decades. Australian military spending in 2024 was 25 percent higher than in 2015. However, the big increases associated with obtaining nuclear-powered submarines have yet to be felt. The government is set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars that should be spent on public housing, welfare and healthcare.
Europe’s trajectory is more dramatic. Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization more than doubled their annual military expenditure in the last decade. Among them is Germany, which in one year has increased its military spending by 28 percent to US$88.5 billion, making it the biggest spender in Western Europe.
These trends will only continue. And it won’t be the wealthy footing the bill—it’ll come at the expense of social services and working-class living standards.
Only a fraction of the money being spent on weaponry would be needed to end world hunger (US$48 billion a year, according to the World Food Program) and provide universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation to 140 low- and middle-income countries (US$138 billion a year, according to the United Nations).
But capitalism’s priorities are elsewhere. British conservative columnist Janan Ganesh, in a March Financial Times <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989">opinion piece</a> titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”, put it plainly: “[T]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt. It was never designed for a world in which living to 100 is banal”.
Every dollar added to the world’s military budgets takes us closer to a potentially apocalyptic scenario of world war. The working classes of all countries have nothing to gain from this. The war drive must be resisted.

Danica Rachel

World military spending explodes

It’s a historic anniversary that the US ruling class and its allies around the world wish we would forget. Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, US imperialism suffered the worst military defeat in its history as troops of the North Vietnamese Army and South Vietnam National Liberation Front took complete control of Ho Chi Minh City (then called Saigon) and the few scattered areas of the south that had not yet been liberated.
The Vietnamese victory was the culmination of more than three decades of struggle against Japanese, British, French and American imperialism. At the time, the United States was, as it still is today, the world’s leading military power. And yet that incredible power was defeated by a small, underdeveloped, mostly rural society.
The US war against Vietnam at some stages involved well over half a million regular US troops. During the war, the US unleashed previously unimaginable firepower against the Vietnamese forces and the population in general. The tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam was approximately three times the total for all theatres in all of World War Two. The US also employed chemical warfare, such as defoliants containing dioxin, which are still today causing deaths and genetic damage. 
Vietnam received limited military supplies from China and the Soviet Union, but they were never enough to be decisive. Surface-to-air rockets, for example, increased the US Air Force’s military losses but never came close to stopping the US air war.
And yet all this firepower was unable to prevent Vietnamese victory. Something proved more powerful than massive weaponry. That reality is the lesson that the imperialists want us to forget.
The liberation of Ho Chi Minh City provided a striking emblem of the limitations of technological military power. As helicopters flew the remaining Americans and some of their Vietnamese agents to warships waiting offshore, the US Navy pushed each emptied helicopter overboard into the sea to make room for those still in the air.
What eventually defeated US military power? First and foremost was the heroism and endurance of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese resistance gradually widened doubts and divisions in US society, opening time and pathways for opposition to the imperialist war within the US and eventually on a massive scale worldwide. 
Combined with the US’s inability to inflict a decisive military defeat, this continually growing political opposition contributed substantially to the US rulers’ calculation that continuing the war could cost them more than they were likely to gain. They could see that, around the world, oppressed and exploited peoples were concluding that the US was not invincible and that it could be successfully resisted.
Earlier struggles similarly influenced the antiwar movement. After the 1940s and ’50s era of McCarthyism and “red scare” reaction and house-breaking of most labour unions, things began to shift with the rise of the Black civil rights movement and the ’60s cultural and political radicalisation. The opponents of the Vietnam War who organised the early teach-ins at universities were, in part, following the example of the combination of propaganda and action of early fighters for Black rights, particularly in the US South.
The influence went in both directions. In April 1967, I was conscripted (“drafted”) into the US Army in Chicago. By chance, this occurred on the same day that boxing champion Muhammad Ali had been ordered to report for induction—which he had publicly announced he would refuse because of his religion as a member of the Nation of Islam and his ethical objections to the war. 
Ali, who had a talent for concise and colourful explanations, said, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”. (“Viet Cong” was the name the US military and media gave to the National Liberation Front.) A week before his scheduled conscription, Ali added:
“I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me; I’d join tomorrow.”
There was considerable public interest in what Ali would do, and one of the soldiers staffing the Chicago induction centre had turned on a radio tuned to a news broadcast. With the report that Ali had refused to be conscripted, I heard one of the Black soldiers mutter, barely audibly, “Damn, wish I had done that”.
As Vietnamese resistance forced the US to increase its troop numbers in the country, conscription also necessarily increased, including of inductees who were either opposed to the war or at least suspicious of it. For thousands of young Americans and their friends, relatives and partners, the war stopped being a strange conflict in a distant country and became an immediate threat to their wellbeing. The impact was all the stronger for their ability to view scenes of the war on nightly TV news.
The US ruling class was beginning to learn something that had only begun to be evident during the 1950-53 Korean War: there is a significant difference between a “citizen army” in which the citizenry feels its interests are seriously threatened by a menace such as fascism, and one facing an abstract enemy such as “communism” that poses no immediate threat—or an oppressed people fighting for their liberation. People who had witnessed or participated in mass antiwar protests tended to have their opposition increased, not weakened, by induction into the military.
During my two years in the army, 1967-69, all within the United States, the challenge was not to convince fellow soldiers that the war was wrong. We had to persuade other soldiers that they could do something about it. This was the period during which the publication of rank-and-file antiwar “newspapers” (really newsletters) proliferated at military bases in the US and overseas. 
At Fort Dix in New Jersey, we called ours the Ultimate Weapon, because the base’s main function was infantry training, and the Army liked to call its infantry “the ultimate weapon”. In the early ’70s, the Student Mobilization Committee, the most radical of the antiwar coalitions, launched a GI Press Service, which sought to provide information, exchange and cooperation among the varied military antiwar publications. We eventually knew of more than a hundred of them.
The spread of antiwar activity in the US military was aided by higher-ups’ bureaucratic efforts to suppress it. A battalion commander who learned of “subversive” activity within his domain, fearing that it would hamper his chances for promotion, would arrange for one or several suspected “ringleaders” to be transferred to a different base, hopefully distant. It could not have been better designed if the object had been to encourage the spread of antiwar activity. The eventual situation was described by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., in Armed Forces Journal, 7 June 1971: 
“The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not nearly mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.”
In short, the US rulers were worried about the effect of the war, not only on their troops in Vietnam, but on their armed forces more generally. President Nixon tried to ameliorate this situation through his program of “Vietnamization” of the war, which essentially meant withdrawing US troops from Vietnam and supplying the puppet “Republic of Vietnam” with sufficient weapons and financing to fight on for US interests. 
From the US standpoint, this was always a forlorn hope, which became increasingly evident after the departure of US ground troops in 1973. When the liberation forces launched their final offensive in early 1975, the “RVN” forces largely melted away or collapsed.
The impact of the Vietnamese victory is still with us, something that capitalist rulers are still trying to overcome. In the US, that impact was often called the “Vietnam syndrome”, as though it described some sort of unfortunate disease. In fact, it referred to the reality that large sections of the US public had seen that their rulers lied shamelessly about a major military conflict. Consequently, they tended to look sceptically at further military operations. 
It has since become standard US political doctrine that any new military adventure needs to be carried out quickly so that there is no time for large parts of the public to become really aware of it. To restore their ability to intervene militarily around the world, the US rulers found it necessary to abolish conscription and to rebuild their army as “voluntary”—meaning using social and economic coercion to enlist mainly the poor and oppressed racial minorities. 
The ending of conscription was a major setback for US imperialism, and its rulers are today, half a century later, wondering whether they can get away with reintroducing it.
You can see another lesson ruling classes have drawn from Vietnam in government responses to the widespread upsurge of solidarity with Palestinians against the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza and the West Bank. The speed and extremism of government reactions against the first university protest encampments showed their fears of protests growing and spreading as they did with Vietnam. It’s the reason for the attempts to suppress free speech and the almost hysterical attacks on protesters. And just as imperialist propagandists of the Vietnam War sought to discredit opposition as “communism”, today supporters of Zionist genocide try to label any opposition as “antisemitism”.
Our side has also drawn some lessons, which is a part of the reason the Palestinian protests have taken the form they have: both the initial encampments and reaching out to broader layers through large and vocal rallies and marches. Around the world, there are uncountable numbers of oppressed and exploited people who may know little or nothing of the Vietnam War but who have absorbed the understanding that imperialism is not invincible, that it can be defeated by determined struggle, and that “If you don’t fight, you lose”.

Allen Myers

Vietnam: a victory never to be forgotten

The Trump administration announced enormous tariff hikes on 2 April, taking them to the highest level in a century. These are a threat to the working class and a weapon in America’s hands as it prepares for a military confrontation with China.
Donald Trump’s tariff announcement caused financial panic, with stock markets crashing as investors pulled their money out, fearing that world trade would tank. When the bond markets moved in, threatening to force up interest rates on debt held by corporations, governments and mortgage holders, Trump was compelled to pull back, implementing a 10 percent tariff on most countries and pausing the higher rates for 90 days. Nonetheless, even at 10 percent tariffs are at their highest for decades. Given Trump’s erratic moves in the past few weeks, anything might happen in three months.
Trump’s main motive is to punish countries with which the US runs big trade deficits. He says that US trading partners have ripped off the US for years and he is going to fix this by making imports from those countries more expensive. That was why in the original plan, tariffs were highest on countries with which the US ran the biggest deficit. 
Trump also sees tariffs as a way to encourage companies that have offshored production to bring it “home” to the US and to force overseas companies to invest and produce in the US. In particular, the president wants to rebuild the US manufacturing base in the service of military preparedness. Former President Joe Biden tried to do that with big subsidies. That had only limited success. Trump is using tariffs to try to force US business to invest more at home.
Trump is also promoting tariffs to generate a federal revenue stream that will allow his administration to eliminate capital gains tax and pay for the renewal of regressive income tax cuts due to lapse in 2027.
Many economic commentators and mainstream politicians have attacked Trump’s tariffs, saying they will harm American capitalism and the interests of the American state. But this means nothing for the working class. These figures just want to patch up the existing trade system in the hope that the capitalists maintain their fortunes. 
Much more important is the devastating impact these tariffs will have on the working class.
First, they exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis. Tariffs make workers poorer by increasing the price of imported goods, most obviously Chinese-made goods, that many low-income households depend on. They also give US producers the opportunity to immediately raise prices on their goods, as they will be under less pressure from imports.
Trump’s tariffs will shift the burden of taxation from the rich to the working class by taxing consumption and lowering taxes on investment incomes. Poorer households spend all their income (and more) and have no or few investments, so are the worst affected.
Trump’s tariffs plan feeds into a right-wing conspiracy that blames scheming foreigners, rather than America’s own billionaires, for US economic problems and the loss of blue-collar jobs. 
Many trade union leaders representing blue-collar workers unfortunately buy into this argument. They argue that workers must form a bloc with American capitalists to lock out imports through tariffs and quotas, a strategy known as protectionism.
Protectionism leads the labour movement in the wrong direction. Rather than fighting the capitalists by striking and occupying their factories to protect jobs, the union leaders jump into bed with the bosses, selling their members out in the name of “saving the industry”.
If “saving the industry” involves cost-cutting, as it invariably does in the cut-throat capitalist world, the union leaders will line up with the bosses to demand workers’ pay this price. This has been the long and sordid history of protectionism in some of the few industries where American unions still have a foothold—auto, steel, chemicals, rubber—and the workers have seen their jobs sold down the river. Far easier for the union bureaucrats to join company delegations to Washington to lobby for tariffs than to mount a fight for jobs.
The tariff trap is alive today. Shawn Fain, the leader of the US United Auto Workers, who appears at anti-Trump rallies condemning the president’s attacks on trade unions and public sector jobs, has applauded Trump’s tariffs as “a major step in the right direction for autoworkers and blue-collar communities across the country”. How are workers meant to fight Trump’s attacks if their leaders are at the same time praising their enemy?
Protectionism also contributes to the kind of nationalist tub thumping that very easily translates from economic competition to military competition. This is increasingly obvious with Trump’s announcement that wound back initially very steep tariffs on Washington’s allies while ratcheting them up on China, which now faces a tariff of 145 percent. The Chinese ruling class is responding in kind. Tariffs are just one element of a broader military build-up by the US against its imperialist rival and contribute to growing racism towards Chinese Americans at home.
This is why socialists oppose all the demands to Buy American, Buy Canadian or Buy Australian so beloved of trade union leaders. It leads us into class collaboration and jingoistic nationalism rather than class struggle and international working-class solidarity.
But if we oppose these tariffs as an attack on the working class and increasing imperialist tensions, this does not mean we support free trade. Free trade and protectionism are simply two different strategies the capitalists use to advance their interests, sometimes leaning towards one, at other times to the other.
If tariffs are currently being introduced by the US to give it an edge in its competition with China, so did the US use free trade for decades to help American companies make money and to advance US power far beyond its borders. Free trade was the flag flown by American gunboats—and British and French gunboats before them—to force open new markets in Africa and Asia. Free trade was the banner flown by the US when it created the post-World War II international financial system that has favoured its capitalists and crushed poorer countries for decades. 
Contrary to what Trump says, the US has not been a victim of free trade but its architect and major beneficiary. It was American multinationals and American governments that offshored production to low-wage countries to boost their fortunes starting in the 1980s. The job losses that resulted were not the responsibility of cheating foreigners but America’s own capitalist class. The US is a victim of no-one. 
It is only now when it faces a growing threat from China, whose economic take-off it initially sponsored, that the US is retreating from free trade. 
Business and governments never have our interests in mind when they choose between free trade and protectionism, only their own.
The working class cannot rely on any scheme capitalist governments devise to protect their interests but must fight against all capitalists and governments, free traders and protectionists alike.
The recent chaos emanating from the White House and New York financial markets demonstrates how much control capitalists and governments have over our lives and how little we have. 
The world is being held to ransom by an increasingly authoritarian US president and the big financial institutions that run the bond markets. Whether or not we have a trade war, whether the world economy tips into recession, what happens to unemployment, whether inflation escalates and whether mortgage rates go up or down, are all decided by tiny numbers of people. Trump is nominally elected but with the political system in America so beholden to big financial interests the democratic process is totally compromised. The financiers are elected by no-one but work herd-like to punish or reward governments as they see fit. 
Recent developments have made clear that you can have democracy, or you can have capitalism, but you can’t have both.

Tom Bramble

Trump’s tariffs an attack on the working class

As Wall Street plummeted, shedding more than US$6 trillion in the days after Donald Trump’s 2 April “reciprocal” tariff announcements, the president posted on social media: “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”
But equity markets refused to settle from their wild paroxysms. The treasury market, which underwrites the US government and the global financial system, also showed signs of stress. 
Yesterday, Trump relented, blaming investors who were “getting a little bit yippy; a little bit afraid”. At least for now, an all-out global trade war has been averted. Trump took on the world and the financial markets and came off second best. But this will not be the end of the matter. “Nothing’s over”, he insisted. 
Internationally, Trump’s crash-or-crash-through strategy is to extract as many concessions as possible for US capitalism. Poor country, rich country, ally or adversary—all states have been put on notice. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/">speaking on the CBS News program </a><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/"></a><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/">Face the Nation</a><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick-on-face-the-nation-with-margaret-brennan-april-6-2025/"></a> on 6 April, outlined what the administration believes to be the stakes:
“You’ve got to realise this is a national security issue. I mean, we don't make medicine in this country any more. We don't make ships. We don't have enough steel and aluminium to fight a battle, right? All our semiconductors are made overseas ... [T]he point is, you need to reset the power of the United States of America and reset it against all our allies and our enemies alike.”
“Why would he treat even our allies like this?”, ask so many US commentators. Maybe it’s because, as <a href="https://nymag.com/article/tom-wolfe-ultimate-power-seeing-em-jump.html">Tom Wolfe noted long ago</a>, the ultimate power is just seeing them jump. 
The primary target, though, remains China, which faces a 125 percent tariff until further notice. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, US administrations have had one overarching national security priority: to prevent a peer-competitor state from emerging. They failed. 
China has developed the most extensive and efficient industrial economy the world has ever seen. It extended its global trade network despite the first Trump administration’s and the subsequent Biden administration’s attempts to undermine it. It has rapidly modernised its military, become a leader in high-tech engineering and AI applications and transformed into a state with global reach and interests—a diplomatic powerhouse.
Trump believes he has the remedy. Yet this week’s gyrations are not simply a matter of geopolitics and trade.
Domestically, the tariffs are an attack on the working class—raising prices and taxing consumption to give the government the budgetary space to proceed with corporate tax cuts. While blaming foreign countries for purportedly destroying the US economy and the lives of millions of workers, Trump is gutting the Department of Labor and attacking agencies that protect workers’ rights. 
He is attempting to purge <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-asks-us-supreme-court-let-him-remove-democratic-members-labor-boards-now-2025-04-09/">National Labor Relations Board</a> members viewed as sympathetic to unions. (The NLRB enforces labour laws protecting the right to join a union and organise in the workplace.) Last month, the president issued an executive order to <a href="https://chcoc.gov/content/guidance-executive-order-exclusions-federal-labor-management-programs">end collective bargaining rights</a> for up to 1 million federal workers.
All this is part of a broader wave of “deregulation” designed to empower US capitalists and weaken the working class’s capacity to defend itself—a prerequisite for both corporate profitability at home and force projection abroad.
Indeed, Trump is waging war on anyone perceived to be an obstacle to his reactionary, ultranationalist agenda. From student anti-war activists to liberal law firms, from national security staff deemed disloyal to the president to universities and schools teaching the real history of America, from anti-discrimination laws to the union movement—Trump is taking a wrecking ball to US civil society and purging the state of all opposition to his program.
Some of this is purely ideological—like the anti-science irrationalism at the heart of the administration. Yet the international and domestic agendas dovetail with the far-right promise of national renewal: the veneration of hierarchy, be it the US at the top of the world, men as patriarchs in the family or bosses as rulers in the workplace; the valorisation of military service, both as individual submission to the state and as a contribution to the projection of national power; the perverse attacks on “communism” in the federal government and the school system, which identify the enemy abroad and depict a culturally corrupting fifth column within; the war on perceived weakness, understood as anything short of hyper-masculine blue-collar value creator at home or soldier of fortune at the front.
“Imperialism ... introduce[s] everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom”, Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin wrote more than 100 years ago. “Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of hostilities.”
Well, we are seeing the intensification of hostilities. The last week was a staring competition between the world’s major powers. Trump may have blinked, but any temporary easing of international tensions might result only in him refocusing on the domestic war and shoring up support for the next confrontation.

Ben Hillier

The logic of Trump’s reactionary agenda

Donald Trump’s decision to upend US relations with some of the country’s main allies heralds the intensification of imperialist competition and the acceleration of an already rapid military build-up in Europe and Asia.
The trigger for the current turmoil is the Trump administration’s decision to throw Ukraine under the bus. Keen to end the financial drain of a stalemated war, the US is trying to come to an agreement with Russia for a ceasefire and peace agreement to be imposed on Ukraine. The result will not be peace, as Trump boasts, but an imperialist carve-up in which Ukraine will surrender one fifth of its territory and most of its mineral wealth to be jointly plundered by the US and Russia, in a deal reminiscent of 19th century colonialism. 
The Trump administration’s plan to cut Ukraine loose, along with its decision to impose onerous tariffs, has caused panic in European capitals as Trump overturns what European leaders have long regarded as a cast-iron US commitment to European defence.
Since the US threw itself into the European war in 1941, it has formed the military backstop for its allies. That put it in a commanding position when it came to dividing the continent as the war came to an end. When US-Soviet relations broke down in 1948, Western European governments looked to the US to defend them. The US, concerned that the Soviet Union would make inroads in Western Europe, introduced a major economic package for its allies, the Marshall Plan, valued at US$160 billion in today’s prices. It encouraged moves towards a common market, the forerunner of today’s European Union, and took the lead in forming NATO in 1949 with an initial 11 other nations, including Britain, France and Italy, Germany joining in 1955. There was never any doubt who called the shots. While the NATO secretary general was by convention European, he always took his orders from the US commander in chief of NATO forces.
The economic and military alliance suited both Western Europe and the US. For the US, it ensured that the Eurasian land mass would not fall under Soviet control—the US could never lay claim to be a leading world power if that occurred. It gave US corporations access to a growing market as Western Europe recovered from the war. US hegemony allowed it to persuade or coerce the European empires to withdraw from their colonies in Africa and Asia, creating openings for US multinationals to exploit new markets, resources and pools of cheap labour.
Western European leaders valued the US partnership because the US provided them with military protection against Soviet advances, relieving them of the expense of building up their own militaries sufficient to deter Russia. While the US was spending 6-8 percent of GDP on its military in the 1960s through to the 1980s, Germany, Spain and Italy, were spending only 2-3 percent. Lower military spending in Europe freed up more money for investment in civilian industries, which began to catch up on US rates of productivity in the postwar decades. US multinationals setting up in Europe provided investment and capitalist know-how to European business and governments. 
NATO also suppressed the potential for a revival of imperialist tensions between France and Germany, responsible for three wars in three quarters of a century. First NATO Secretary General Lord Ismay accurately described the bloc’s purpose as “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. 
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many former Moscow-aligned states rushed to join both, leading to the expansion of NATO and the EU to territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Russian border in places. 
Much of the media coverage of Trump’s aggressive pronouncements portrays the European powers as victims of US bullying. The EU has a reputation of being a champion of “soft power”, emphasising diplomacy and economic and cultural ties with its neighbours rather than military force. There is nothing “soft”, however, about much of the EU’s operations. Like Russia and the US, the EU is an imperialist actor defending the interests of its big capitalists against the working class at home and the oppressed overseas. While the EU lacks an army or navy, its bigger member states are violent imperialists, as evident in France’s military interventions in Africa and Italy’s brutal treatment of refugees in the Mediterranean. 
The EU has long insisted on neoliberal budgetary measures restricting spending on social services and the welfare state. Governments borrowing from the European Central Bank have been subjected to harsh austerity measures, while nations applying to join the EU are required to sign up to a full neoliberal program favouring corporate interests. 
There is nothing progressive about the EU, and falling foul of Trump doesn’t change that. 
With a $20 trillion GDP, the EU is the second largest economy in the world after the US, and represents around one-sixth of the global economy. In civilian aircraft, Europe’s Airbus have gone head-to-head with Boeing in the chase for big orders from Asia and Middle Eastern airlines. So while in the immediate postwar decades the US was the dominant partner in the transatlantic alliance, in more recent decades, the EU has begun to challenge the US on a range of fronts.
The EU’s expansion and growth have given it more clout in the contest between competing imperialist powers. EU institutions have pushed back against US corporations, and the European Commission has levied big fines on US companies for anti-competitive practices. European governments have at times also challenged the US diplomatically, most notably in 2003, when Germany and France refused to back President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Some, Germany most notably, have also sought closer relations with Russia and China, reducing their economic and energy dependence on the US. In response, the US has demanded that its NATO partners increase their military spending to match that of the US and imposed financial penalties and export restrictions on European businesses operating in US markets and third countries.
For a while tensions between the US and EU were kept in check. The growth of the Republican right in the 2010s signalled a much more aggressive US approach to the EU. The Republican right regard the EU as a rival and, through its demands for military defence, a drain on the US treasury. They want to smash it up or at least severely weaken it. As “America First” politicians, they reason that the US will be in a better position to assert its leadership without an at-times oppositional EU. Trump’s MAGA project fitted the bill. 
In his first term in office, Trump called the EU a “foe” and imposed tariffs on European steel and aluminium and frequently threatened to extend these to European cars. Trump backed Brexit, Britain’s departure from the EU, as it removed one of the EU’s biggest economies and its most battle-hardened military. Trump celebrated the electoral success of Eurosceptic parties, seeing them as a European incarnation of his own right-wing nationalist project.
Trump also attacked NATO, calling it “obsolete” in 2017. He followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, though, in demanding NATO member states meet the defence spending target of 2 percent of GDP. What was different now was Trump stating that the US might go its own way if its NATO partners did not meet the target. Underpinning this was a desire to pivot the US military and defence industries away from Europe and towards the Asia-Pacific.
Trump’s “America First” approach rattled sections of the US ruling class in his first term in office. Many wanted to stick with the multilateral approach that had served them well for years. They supported Trump’s identification of China as the most serious threat but opposed his attacks on traditional allies. Trump’s successor Joe Biden attempted to right the ship by lashing together a supposed alliance of democracies to resist what he called autocratic China and Russia. 
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Biden’s watch exposed Europe’s military weakness. British and French leaders may object to US Vice President J.D. Vance describing them as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”, but they recognise the underlying reality—that the long period of peace from 1945 until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (interrupted only by war in the Balkans in the 1990s), has left them ill prepared for war against another imperialist power. 
Even before the Ukraine invasion, European NATO members were raising military spending, but in the three years since, they have collectively increased spending on defence by one-third. EU powerhouse Germany, responsible for a quarter of the bloc’s GDP but a fraction of its military spending, sharply reversed years of declining military outlays. In Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, governments increased spending even more dramatically. NATO has also expanded its borders, Sweden and Finland joining the bloc after decades of neutrality, and Ireland too drawing closer. At US prompting, NATO also officially targeted China as a “strategic threat” and drew in Australia, Japan and South Korea as participants in NATO forums to widen the bloc’s theatre of operations.
While the EU is an economic giant, it remains a military lightweight compared to the US. Trump is using this disparity to threaten European governments with unilateral withdrawal from mutual defence commitments enshrined in the NATO charter if they do not spend 5 percent of their GDP on the military, far above even what the US now spends (3.4 percent). Trump’s aggression towards other NATO members is also obvious with his stated desire to annex Canada and Greenland, a territory of Denmark. While it’s unlikely that the US will ditch its European allies—US global power still relies on maintaining a stake in Europe—Trump is certainly trying to bend European leaders to the US’s will, as Biden and Obama did before him, but in Trump’s case without the diplomatic niceties.
Trump is also using Europe’s vulnerability to advance US interests in commercial negotiations. For years, US politicians and business groups have objected to the European Commission’s trade rules that protect European capitalist interests at the expense of US corporations, ranging from rules governing hormone-fed beef and environmental standards to IT security. Big US merchandise trade deficits with the EU have rankled Congress. 
During his first term, Trump attempted to impose swingeing tariffs on Europe, but faced opposition in Congress and from some of his advisers, some of whom were still attached to the idea of free trade. This time around he is much more likely to be successful since his political base is much more powerful and united behind his “America First” project.
In response to Trump’s threats, Europe’s leaders are now dramatically upgrading plans for military spending. Germany’s parliament has just passed legislation to provide €500 billion to extra military spending, while the European Union has approved €800 billion in additional borrowing to pay for military spending. Denmark has announced a $7 billion rearmament plan, representing a 70 percent increase. Poland is raising its military spending to 4.7 percent of its GDP. 
Nuclear proliferation is part of this militarist step-up. Germany and Poland, both non-nuclear powers, are discussing with French President Emmanuel Macron a way to extend France’s nuclear weapons to cover their territory as well. Britain, still a significant military force and nuclear power, has been drawn closer to European rearmament.
Such a massive rearmament raises the prospect of Europe developing its own military capability. The idea of an independent military force has been debated by European leaders over decades and every time rejected on the grounds that the US could always be relied upon to come to Europe’s aid if it is attacked. Times have changed. In the short term, European governments will continue to depend on the US for security because they are incapable of scaling up their own militaries quickly enough and lack a unified military command structure; a United States of Europe is still not a reality. We cannot rule out, however, that in coming one or two decades, European governments may try to pursue a more independent path, even if decades of entanglement in the US military will make this very difficult. 
Nothing to do with this push towards greater independent firepower is politically progressive. Mainstream political commentators, and in some cases governments, in Europe, Canada, Mexico and Australia, have trumpeted their opposition to Trump by waving their national (or EU) flags. In Canada, for example, there is a big push going on to “buy Canadian” and to scrap US holiday plans. In Australia, the Greens are proposing a more independent defence policy. There is certainly an audience for such an approach. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in Canada has gone from deadbeats to favourites in April’s federal election. In Australia, everyone from Malcolm Turnbull to Paul Keating has been applauded in liberal circles for denouncing Trump. But none of this is left wing or does anything to challenge the imperialist competition now unfolding. 
If there are differences between the imperialist powers, whether in Moscow, Berlin or Washington, they are united in their determination to make the working class pay for rearmament. The talk in Europe now is of “warfare states, not welfare states”. When hospitals, schools and welfare beneficiaries knock on the government’s door for funds, the pantry is always bare. But when it comes to the military, money can always be found.
The Starmer government in Britain is already proposing to spend an extra £6 billion every year to lift military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP. Getting to Trump’s target of 5 percent would take the annual figure to £12 billion. That means taking from the budget money that could pay for thousands more doctors and nurses in the National Health Service or four new hospitals or 2,000 new ambulances or 75,000 new council houses. This is a global trend.
Then there is the militarisation of society that will accompany the arms spending. Poland is already proposing to more than double the size of its army to half a million and to ensure that every young man undertakes military training. The focus on the military, entirely dependent on fossil fuels, will weaken European governments’ already dwindling support for measures to tackle climate change. Policies towards migrants and refugees will become even more restrictive and racist. With military industries and facilities subjected to restrictive legislation, workers’ rights will come under further attack. The political right will be emboldened. 
We see a similar push towards greater militarism in the Asia-Pacific. Every government is rapidly building its military. Australia is increasing military spending by tens of billions of dollars, with orders for new drones, ships and aircraft and plans to spend hundreds of billions on nuclear submarines. Acquiring US nuclear submarines is a bilateral priority because their addition to Australia’s arsenal will make the country a top 10 military power and a valuable US ally in any war with China. This ambition also explains the bilateral support for turning northern Australia into a base for the US Marines, Air Force and Navy. Two other big regional military powers, Japan and South Korea, are doing much the same. 
Socialists must oppose all imperialism—whether Western or non-Western—while standing with ordinary people fighting for justice and self-determination. That Trump is screwing Europe today should not make us lend the latter any sympathy. Every power in the world is more urgently looking to build its military in the era of Trump and all of it will come at a terrible price for workers. We desperately need a stronger socialist movement to oppose this horror and fight for an alternative to this system of inequality, oppression and war.

Imperialist competition drives military build-up

The disclosure of the deliberations over a military strike on Yemen among top Trump administration officials—only known because National Security Adviser Mike Waltz added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat on the Signal app—gave the foreign policy establishment an opening to slam Trump’s amateurish foreign policy. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/opinion/trump-hegseth-signal-chat.html">New York Times op-ed</a> summed up this view. “How much dumber can this get?” Clinton asked.
Of course, Clinton has no objection to the US using its military power to attack another nation <a href="https://theintercept.com/2025/03/26/signal-chat-yemen-strike/">in a raid that killed dozens of civilians</a>. It’s that she and the foreign policy establishment she represents prefer smart people like themselves to carry them out. For liberals and establishment types, “Signalgate” exposes Trump’s foreign policy as the province of people in way over their heads, and whose actions threaten to unravel the US’s position as the main world superpower.
That assessment may be true, but it’s also shot through with a conceit that Trump and his administration have no strategy or theory behind what they are doing. Trump’s foreign policy plays are seen simply as the whims of a fool interested in his own personal aggrandisement.
Even if Trump tends to see US foreign policy as little more than an extension of his reality TV persona, the changes that his administration are initiating are momentous.
In the traditional mainstream understanding that Clinton encapsulates, US foreign policy is the summation of three main prongs: its external economic policy, its “hard power” (expressed through its military and political clout) and its “soft power,” or its ideological and cultural influence.
Since the end of Second World War, the US has achieved most of its goals through the construction of—and US dominance over—an array of global institutions, such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, to name a few. Since the end of the Cold War and the establishment of the US’s “unipolar moment”, the US has projected its military, economic and political hegemony under the guise of maintaining the “rules-based international order” ostensibly dedicated to promoting democracy and human rights.
This self-projection of US aims was always more rhetorical than real. The US never allowed international political institutions to constrain its unilateral actions. And it continues to spend more on its military than the rest of the world combined. US promotion of global economic trade and US corporate expansion around the world always relied on US “hard power”, to back it up, as the famous quip from the New York Times’ <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/damato/2001/04/imp-state.html">muse of empire, Thomas Friedman</a>, put it:
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
The wars in Gaza and Ukraine exposed the utter hypocrisy of US dedication to the “rules-based international order”. US leaders, from President Joe Biden on down, denounced Russian bombings of Ukrainian hospitals and schools as “crimes against humanity”, while providing Israel with the weapons and political cover it used to carry out identical atrocities in Gaza.
For 80 years, the existing alliances and institutions of global politics have served US imperial policy well. Now, we are faced with what appears to be the unprecedented situation in which the “hegemonic power” has become the main “revisionist power” in the world system, <a href="https://inflectionpointpodcast.substack.com/p/when-the-clock-broke-starring-john">as New Left Review contributor Dylan Riley put it</a>. In other words, it appears than the US, the global “hegemon” who has benefited so richly from the existing framework of international politics, is, paradoxically, the main actor (the “revisionist power” in the language of international relations) seeking to overturn that order.
The question is why. The answer lies in the challenge, emerging dramatically in the last twenty years, that China now poses to US economic and political leadership in the world.
By most mainstream accounts the US maintains military superiority over China for now. But it is rapidly losing its economic and technological edge to China, where more scientific research is now published than in the US. The January stock market panic over the announced success of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek suggested that the US is on the way to come in second to China on the cutting-edge technology of the 21st century.
These challenges, combined with US-led disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq that weakened the US, punctured the “unipolar moment”, leading to a more fragmented and multipolar world. The results have been increased nationalism and protectionism, and the ratcheting up of military budgets across the globe. On these indices, Biden built off initial moves in these directions under the first Trump administration. For example, Biden did not lift tariffs on Chinese manufactured goods that Trump imposed in 2018. Now, Trump appears to want to blow up the whole system.
Following the Greek left Keynesian economist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms5-Z7sqiww">Yanis Varofakis</a>, let’s take Trump’s tariff obsession seriously to find a method in Trump’s apparent madness. Trump’s critique of the postwar global order starts with the observations that the US has extended its nuclear and security umbrella over its NATO allies and has acted as the “importer of last resort” for the global trade system. US corporations have offshored and downsized their productive capacity. In exchange, and because the US dollar is the world exchange current, other leading powers finance the US’s debt and allow it to run huge deficits and maintain a military machine that would bankrupt any other country.
<a href="https://gilbert-achcar.net/america-first">While this system has benefited the US enormously</a>, Trump argues instead that “other countries are ripping off” the US. Trump wants to see the US dollar depreciate—to encourage US exports and cut US trade and government deficits—while maintaining the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. He uses tariffs and threats to withdraw US military protection to get other countries to accept those terms. Using various trade carrots and sticks, Trump thinks he can make multiple deals with individual countries or groups of countries. He rejects global institutions and multilateral “grand bargains” because he thinks he can win better terms with fewer constraints on US actions.
Whether this is a correct diagnosis of the US’s standing in the global political economy or a correct prescription for what the US should do is beside the point. The WTO has been largely non-functional since the first Trump term <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-launches-wto-dispute-over-trump-tariffs-2025-02-05/">as both the Trump and Biden administrations have refused</a> to appoint US representatives to appeals boards that are supposed to resolve trade disputes between the two countries. The current obsession of <a href="https://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/NDS-commission.html">the US ruling class with a coming conflict with China</a> has augured in an era of protectionism in economic affairs and greater political competition and conflict between the leading powers.
In this environment, Trump’s “America First” and “US against the world” outlook will be tested. Liberals tag him with the 1930s epithet of “isolationist”. But he’s less committed to disengaging with the rest of the world, as he is prepared to throw around the US’s weight to advance its own interests. He has more of a “gunboat diplomacy” nineteenth-century colonial/imperial mentality. 
So, if he thinks that Greenland contains minerals the US wants, or its possession will allow the US to dominate the Arctic, other nations will be wary of the US, even if annexing the island appears to be a Trump fantasy. Historically, the “America First” strain of US politics has considered the land mass between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, from pole to pole, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/opinion/trump-american-empire-panama.html">as being fair game for US hemispheric domination</a>.
Consolidating a US-dominated sphere of influence in the region supports “America Firsters’” aggressive posture against other spheres, such as Europe or Asia. This is the twisted logic behind Trump’s pressure on Mexico and Canada, as well as his threats to Panama and Greenland. Trump’s sabre rattling against Panama has already produced the sale of the canal’s operational contract from the Hong Kong-based CK Hutchinson to a Blackrock-led consortium. Beyond this, Trump has allies among the Latin American far right, from Argentina’s Milei to Brazil’s Bolsonaro to El Salvador’s Bukele.
The most shocking development to the foreign policy establishment has been the Trump regime’s shift on Ukraine to an essentially pro-Putin position in enforcing a ceasefire in the war. In February, the US cast an amazing vote alongside such champions of democracy as North Korea and Belarus against a UN resolution identifying Russia as the aggressor in the Ukraine war.
How to explain this? Trump and his MAGA allies promised this, so it didn’t come out of blue. It is part of a piece with Trump’s break with global alliances such as NATO and seeing the EU as more of a competitor than an ally. Trump certainly has more affinity with petrostate dictators like Putin or Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin-Salman than he has with the US’s traditional allies. The administration’s antagonism to Europe appears deep-seated, as Signalgate’s revelations of <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/03/26/vance-anti-europe-obsession">Vice President Vance’s anti-EU comments showed</a>.
It also appears to fit with Trumpism’s nineteenth-century view that great powers have their “spheres of influence” that they carve up between them. So, Russia gets Ukraine. China gets Taiwan. And the US gets Greenland.
Whether this Trumpian shift in US foreign policy will produce the “golden age” that Trump promises is doubtful. But what we can predict is that world politics is entering a much more dangerous and unstable time in which wars, conflict and repression will be more on the order of the day than they have been for decades.
First published at the <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/">International Socialism Project</a>. Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Democrats: A Critical History</a> and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a>.

Lance Selfa

Trump’s foreign policy: the method behind the madness

The National Defence Strategic Review, released in 2023 by the federal government, notes “only a remote possibility of any power contemplating an invasion” of Australia. This is the federal government’s official position, formulated by, among others, Army Major General Richard Vagg and Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, a former head of the armed forces. 
It is astounding, then, that the Greens have launched <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/4-billion-sovereign-defence-capacity">a policy to develop Australia’s military-industrial base</a>, which would allocate $4 billion to “sovereign manufacturing capabilities” of drones and missiles, purportedly to “defend” Australia. When not even the military can outline a plausible scenario in which a foreign invasion threatens this continent, why are the Greens suddenly positioning themselves as defenders of the realm against an undefined enemy? 
Australian governments have a history of lying and fearmongering about national security threats. But they usually at least provide scenarios or statements capable of being critically evaluated, such as, “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”. The Greens don’t offer even this level of phantom to critique.
Last year’s National Defence Strategy, which outlines the Defence Department’s evaluation of “security risks”, didn’t even mention the possibility of an invasion of Australia. But it did discuss the need for a military “more capable of the impactful projection” of power and for “a sovereign defence industrial base” to manufacture weapons and drones, among other things, to aid this “force projection” (otherwise known as invasion and interference operations in the Pacific and Southeast Asia). 
The Greens’ brains trust says its proposed military-industrial base reinvigoration will be used “for strictly defensive purposes only”—presumably unlike the similar-sounding military-industrial base the war hawks at Defence have proposed. Are the Greens really so naïve as to think that increased domestic military production capacity will not be used for force projection—the bread and butter of Australian statecraft since Federation? What will their next policy announcement be? A program to rebuild Australia’s derelict pubs “for purposes strictly related to sobriety”?
“We see this as the first step ... we don’t pretend this is the beginning and the end of the significant reorganisation required for Australia’s defence force”, Greens spokesperson David Shoebridge <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/4-billion-sovereign-defence-capacity">told ABC defence correspondent Andrew Greene</a> on the weekend. Greene noted that the party has never before released “a formally costed policy to fund new military programs”.
Responding to the announcement, Euan Graham, a director at the hawkish and pro-US Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Sky News that the Greens’ “willingness to talk about increased defence spending and production” is a sign of “positive change” in the party.
Of course, it would be unfair to describe the Greens as a bunch of warmongers. The new policy, announced last Saturday, also calls to “decouple” the Australian armed forces from the US military and comes as the party <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/end-aukus">urges the federal government to withdraw from the AUKUS pact</a>, a military and technology-sharing partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom through which Australia will obtain a suite of nuclear submarines. 
The Greens propose funding social programs from the savings gained by scrapping the pact—some $70 billion over ten years. Further, the party’s policies would likely reduce Australia’s military spending by perhaps half a trillion dollars over several decades. 
Scrapping AUKUS is a supportable policy. But it is not particularly progressive, nor all that controversial. Even former foreign minister Bob Carr, and former PMs Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull have rubbished the pact. Indeed, sections of the old Labor right were the first to criticise it. Yet the key issue in all this is not the precise locations from which Australia’s military sources its weaponry or the price it pays to obtain its hardware. 
The Greens’ shift comes as we enter <a href="https://redflagnewsletter.substack.com/p/note-5-europes-military-spending" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a period of global rearmament</a> in which two superpowers, China and the United States, are preparing for a confrontation. President Trump demands greater military spending by European members of the Western imperialist alliance and is shifting the US posture towards a range of states. 
In many cases, this has given militarism a new colour. Countries that fear losing Washington’s backing bow to Trump’s demands while selling the rearmament programs as some newfound independence. <a href="https://redflagnewsletter.substack.com/p/note-6-adam-tooze-and-the-liberal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">It’s progressive liberalism’s imperial revenge</a>: build the military to resist the far-right ogres in the White House and in the Kremlin. 
The Greens have tapped into this sentiment to sell their own policy shift. In this context, they are floating with the tide when every left-wing organisation ought to be swimming against the current. 
First, they float along with the liberal conceit that decoupling rearmament programs from “Donald Trump’s military” (as the Greens press release refers to US imperialism) is progressive or “independent”—as though the Australian ruling class is qualitatively different from others around the world. 
Second, they float along with the China panic by proposing a significant boost to “defensive” military-industrial capacity when, in reality, Australia’s military force posture and structure are being aggressively reconfigured for a confrontation with China. 
The Greens say they oppose military operations that “threaten our neighbours”. But the AUKUS pact, the renewed Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the United States, and Australia joining NATO as an “Indo-Pacific partner” are manifestations, rather than causes, of the underlying dynamic toward war in the western Pacific. While objectionable, these mini pacts are not the main thing. Nor is Donald Trump, the widespread distaste for whom the Greens are leveraging to build support for their military policy. 
Australia’s steadfast political alliance with the United States is far more important than its technical and logistical incorporation into US military planning. The alliance is foundational to Australia’s foreign affairs, not simply its defence policy. As such, the Greens’ talk about developing an “independent foreign policy” is risible when the party proposes little more than haggling around military procurement. So is the talk about “not threatening our neighbours”, which is a fantasy when Australia is a strategic base for and an unbending ally of US imperialism. <a href="https://greens.org.au/magazine/closepinegap-13-years-later">Former Senator Scott Ludlam understood this</a>. It’s not clear that David Shoebridge does—what’s his position on closing Pine Gap?
Without a commitment to breaking the US alliance in all its forms, expelling all US military forces from Australia, and dismantling all US intelligence-gathering installations, “peace”, “non-alignment”, “neighbourly respect” or other feel-good phrases are nothing but foreign policy bromides. Yet the Greens’ position is not to tear up the ANZUS treaty, considered the foundational document of the alliance, but to “renegotiate Australia’s position” within it.
Yet even a commitment to breaking the US alliance is not enough. Given the global dynamic, left-wing parties cannot settle for “detachment”. We have to fight against all manifestations of military aggression, whether they emanate from the new far-right aligned with Donald Trump or from the liberal alternatives. This is particularly true in imperialist countries such as Australia, which has joined criminal invasions or interfered in the domestic affairs of several countries in the region and beyond.
All this is too much for the Greens. Being tolerated as a “reasonable” party capable of forming government means accepting a range of capitalist non-negotiables, such as the state’s need for a competent military. “Self-defence” is the immediate argument to legitimise the new defence policy. But the party is probably also signalling that it should be considered a potential partner in the event of a hung parliament in the upcoming election.
To resist the new militarism and to prevent more war, we have to call bullshit on the rhetoric of “self-defence” used by governments to justify rocketing arms spending. And we have to build an international alliance of working-class and oppressed people—not an alliance of states and their rulers. On this front, the Greens’ new defence policy points in the wrong direction.

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Trump’s tariffs an attack on the working class

The logic of Trump’s reactionary agenda

Imperialist competition drives military build-up

Trump’s foreign policy: the method behind the madness

A criticism of the Greens’ defence policy

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