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.

A criticism of the Greens’ defence policy

US President Donald Trump has thrown Ukraine to the wolves. After carrying out a brutal invasion for three years, during which a million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now being rewarded with a large slice of the country’s territory, while Trump is demanding a substantial stake of its resource wealth for the US.
This is imperial plunder at its finest: powerful countries ripping up a weaker one for their own benefit.
Commenting on the war in recent weeks, Trump has repeated his strange views on the world’s hierarchy of suffering. According to him, the main victim of the European slaughter is the US, because it has sent “hundreds of billions of dollars” in aid (like most of Trump’s comments, this is a gross exaggeration). The villain is Ukraine for continuing to resist Russian imperialism. And exhausted Russia, with its unfairly maligned dictator, deserves a break. 
This is Trump’s enduring view of international politics: poor little America has been ripped off by everyone. It is as unhinged as his ramblings about migrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio. 
The US spent the greater part of the last century invading other countries, overthrowing governments and exploiting half the globe through its multinational corporations. Now, Trump wants to amp it up by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, subsuming Canada and turning Gaza into a playground for US billionaires.
Putin, for his part, has sent the Russian military and mercenaries on bloody rampages through Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and West Africa, and shielded his fellow dictators from popular uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
It appears that everyone wants to play the victim now. The European powers and the United Kingdom say that Trump has abandoned them—that they have been left to fend for themselves in the noble task of protecting weaker countries. They say they must massively beef up their military spending to develop much bigger and much deadlier armed forces.
The European Commission has moved to allow €800 billion in additional borrowing by EU governments to “substantially increase” military spending. Germany’s incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to do “whatever it takes” to raise half a trillion euros for the military. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to cut the foreign aid budget to increase military spending. This is all on top of a 30 percent increase in EU member states’ spending on the military since 2021.
Their justification for military expansion is one of the more Orwellian pieces of capitalist propaganda: that more weapons equal more peace. In reality, they want only to defend and extend their own national interests in an increasingly unstable world.
The increased spending will come at an enormous cost to European and British workers, who have already endured waves of austerity over the last fifteen years. The money will have to come from somewhere, most likely health and social services that matter far less to the capitalists than lower taxes and subsidies for business. Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh put it plainly in an article titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”:
“The 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 ... I have come to doubt whether rich, democratic societies can make difficult reforms—except in a crisis. Chronic discomfort isn’t enough. An element of real fear has to come in, as perhaps it has now.”
While workers get poorer, those at the top get richer from an expanding war machine. According to the US State Department, US weapons manufacturers and military contractors registered an unprecedented increase in sales last year. This made 2024 one of their most profitable years ever, thanks to the slaughters in Ukraine and Gaza and the military buildup around China. European weapons companies’ stocks have soared in the last week. 
There is much speculation about why Trump has sold out Ukraine. Some chalk it up to his erratic nature and admiration of dictators. While Trump does indeed seem to have an affinity for Putin (an authoritarianism to aspire to, perhaps), there’s an underlying imperialist logic to his actions—one that has nothing to do with peace. 
The biggest threat to US global supremacy is China, the world’s second-biggest economy, which has significantly modernised its military over the last decade and formed an alliance with Russia. The US has been trying to “pivot” its war machine to confront China for years; there’s just a disagreement among US elites over how exactly to do it. 
The Biden administration favoured strengthening multilateral international alliances, such as NATO, while building the military-industrial complex at home. 
Trump favours a more transactional approach—get the best deal with whatever country—which can mean extorting traditional allies. Some in the Trump administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, argue that the US should try to cleave Russia away from China, or at least weaken their alliance. In addition, Trump has grumbled for years that the US shoulders the economic burden of Western military alliances—he wants the Europeans to spend substantially more, rather than rely on a US security guarantee.
There has been much handwringing among global commentators about Trump’s approach, particularly about what it means for the “rules-based order”. In foreign policy speak, this refers to the post-World War Two set of rules administered through bodies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, which supposedly protect the sovereignty of individual countries, preserve peace and curb excessive uses of power. 
But one only has to look at the Vietnam War, successive invasions of the Middle East, Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and countless other atrocities to see that the “order” was an alliance of powerful countries, including the US, Europe, the UK, Japan, Australia and others, who used economic or military pressure to rig the world in their favour. 
The US’s allies and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media are upset that the rules are possibly being altered. But they’re all still playing the same dirty game: powerful countries ruling the world through shifting networks of alliances. 
The Trump administration also demands higher military spending from Australia, an increasingly important country for the US because of its location in Southeast Asia and willingness to host US military and spy bases. Eldridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for head of policy at the Defence Department, said last week that Australia needs to increase defence spending to 3 percent of GDP. Australia is already trekking in this direction, spending a record $56 billion, or 2 percent of GDP, this year. Treasury expects it to rise to 2.4 percent in 2027-28.
Many Australian commentators are beginning to urge the government to join the global military buildup. Take the Australian Financial Review’s Christopher Joye: 
“We have to be able to produce our own ballistic missiles with the ability to strike any place on the planet. We need independent nuclear power and the capacity to enrich weapons-grade uranium for strategic optionality. And we need scores of nuclear submarines ...”
The Labor government has steadfastly refused to criticise Trump in any way, even over Ukraine, for fear of pissing off the new president, in part fearing that the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal be put at risk. But that deal ought to immediately be scrapped. Writing at the Conversation last year, Australian National University visiting fellow Peter Martin noted:
“Australia’s decision to buy three nuclear-powered submarines and build another eight is so expensive that, for the $268 billion to $368 billion price tag, we could give a million dollars to every resident of Geelong, or Hobart, or Wollongong.”
The threat of a future global war seems so far away that many don’t take it seriously. The climate change and attacks on our living standards and the oppressed seem, and are, more immediate. But every new increase to a military budget, every new nuclear-powered submarine and every new speech about the threat of China takes us a step closer to that reality. 
The Ukrainian experience gives us a horrifying glimpse of what such a war might look like: the military tactics of old—protracted trench warfare in which millions of young soldiers are fed through the meat grinder—combined with cutting-edge technology such as kamikaze drones and AI-assisted cyber warfare. Not to mention that there are now enough nuclear weapons to obliterate all of humanity. Inside Russia, Putin has overseen an authoritarian crackdown to suppress any whiff of dissent to his invasion.
Workers and the oppressed worldwide have no interest in any of this—wars are the consequence of rivalries among the world’s ruling class spilling out into armed competition. Trump, Starmer, Merz and the rest are ramping up nationalist rhetoric to convince their populations to accept the economic burden of this remilitarisation drive. 
But you won’t ever see Elon Musk, Gina Rinehart, Donald Trump or Anthony Albanese on the battlefield—they make the rest of us fight on their behalf. Our world is run by monsters who will send millions to die if it means a bigger slice of the capitalist pie for themselves.
We have to build a socialist alternative to this never-ending nightmare of death and destruction. Unless we fight back, they will keep playing the same game of war and conquest, with us as their pawns.

Eleanor Morley

Resist the new militarism

Robert Narai

Trump and US imperialism—an interview with Joel Geier

Every day brings a new barrage of announcements by US President Donald Trump and billionaire bigot buddy Elon Musk. Working on the basis that, if they throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will stick, Trump and Musk are creating pandemonium in Washington, DC. 
But while all may seem to be chaos in the halls of power, there is a thread of logic behind it all. Trump is ripping up accepted political norms at home and the liberal world order abroad because, in his view, they have failed to secure American supremacy. Trump’s package of measures, taken together, constitutes a strategy to break America from its cycle of relative decline and come out on top.
Trump’s program is squarely aimed at China. China’s rise to world power status is an existential threat to US hegemony, and Trump's program is the latest attempt to hold China down and assert US global power.
US relations with China have undergone a series of twists and turns since 1949, when the Communist Party (CCP) defeated the US-backed Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in a bloody civil war. The US refused to recognise the new government and imposed a total financial and trade boycott. In the Cold War environment, where the USSR and US competed for world supremacy, Mao Zedong’s Communists, who looked to Moscow, were part of the enemy camp. 
In the Korean War, which started just months after the CCP took power, China and the United States came to blows. Following North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the US-backed regime in the South, the US sent hundreds of thousands of troops to prop up its client government and pushed North Korean forces back close to the border with China. Fearing a US invasion, China responded by dispatching the People’s Liberation Army to drive the Americans back. Before long, a stalemate had been reached. There followed two more years of inconclusive fighting before a ceasefire was declared in 1953, which is still in place today, a frozen conflict.
The Korean War did two things to China. It reinforced the country’s close relationship and, indeed, military dependency on the USSR, and it forced the CCP to transform the economy. In the first year or two of Communist rule, the government proceeded cautiously with economic reform and looked to the capitalists to rebuild the economy, which had been wrecked by years of war and foreign occupation. The immense economic strain imposed by the Korean War and the fact that war could resume on the Korean peninsula at any moment drove home to the CCP the need to drastically speed up the process of industrialisation for military purposes. Soviet-style central planning seemed the surest way to do so. Within the space of three years, the Communist government expropriated the capitalist class and replaced them with a bureaucratic Communist regime based on state capitalist lines, much as Stalin had done in Russia in 1929. Self-sufficiency and autarky were prioritised, and foreign trade and investment, except for Soviet aid, were reduced to a minimum. 
China’s close relationship with the USSR lasted only a few years. Mao’s Communists grew to resent what they regarded as overbearing Soviet interventions and were suspicious of its overtures to the US after Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956. In 1964, the two sides split, China declaring the Soviet Union a traitor to the cause of world communism. 
Just as the Korean War had consolidated one alignment of imperialist forces, the Vietnam War was the trigger for another. By the late 1960s, Washington had realised it was losing in Vietnam: it had the military firepower to destroy the country but could not crush the popular Vietnamese resistance. It was facing a growing anti-war movement at home, and US soldiers were mutinous. The US wanted to get its ground troops out. For its part, China, which backed the North Vietnamese government, was looking to break out of its diplomatic isolation. Such was its enmity with Moscow that reconciliation with the USSR was not an option. Vietnam peace talks, which started in Paris in 1968, provided the backdrop for a rapprochement between the US and China based on their common hostility to the USSR. In 1972, US President Richard Nixon visited Beijing, and a new imperialist era was born. Formal diplomatic relations between the US and China were restored seven years later.
China may have broken from its isolation, but it was still desperately poor. In the early 1980s, the Chinese government began steadily to relax state control over its economy to stimulate growth. The process advanced in fits and starts. Inflation and growing economic inequality associated with market reforms sparked widespread discontent, which erupted in 1989, known best for the massive student protest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing but which also involved numerous worker protests in several cities. 
The CCP’s response to Tiananmen Square and its need to increase foreign investment to finance development was twofold: one, an energetic opening to foreign trade and investment and, two, the ratcheting up of political repression to block direct challenges to Communist rule and prevent workers from organising to push up wages. Foreign investment by Chinese diaspora businesses began to flood in to take advantage of tax breaks and cheap land and labour, initially to produce low-end textiles and household goods. 
Starting soon after economic reopening, the Chinese government also shut many of the country’s state-owned enterprises—those in declining industries and unlikely ever to make a return on investment. Tens of millions of workers lost their jobs in the north of the country, while tens of millions more from rural areas headed to seaboard cities in the south, where they filled the production lines of the new factories, having none of the rights of the existing urban workforce. Before long, Western investors had joined their Asian peers in heading for China.
The 1990s and 2000s were the heyday of collaboration between US and Chinese capital and governments. US businesses shifted low-end production to China in search of big profits and new export markets. Even where industry remained in the US, the entry of hundreds of millions of low-paid Chinese workers into the world labour market helped US capitalists keep wages down. For its part, the Chinese government got Western investment, R&amp;D, know-how and access to wealthy markets. Both benefited when China used its rapidly growing foreign exchange reserves to buy US government bonds, enabling the US to finance its government debt at low interest rates.
China rose from a marginal economic player, less than 2 percent of world economy in 1979, to become the number two economic power when it superseded Japan and Germany in 2010.
There were certainly tensions in the relationship with the US. In 1999, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as part of its war with Serbia. The US “war on terror” in Afghanistan in the early 2000s was aimed, at least in part, at preventing China’s growing influence in Central Asia. Each side needled the other about their respective domestic political regimes. Business owners on each side told of industrial sabotage, theft of intellectual property, unfair government subsidies, legal systems stacked in favour of the other side and so on. Nonetheless, the US believed it could incorporate China within the US-dominated world economy and, on that basis, sponsored China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
China’s rise to number two economic power was celebrated by many Western ideologists, both the right and some formerly of the left. They said China’s economic miracle was proof that capitalist “free markets” trumped socialist central planning, an argument given greater force by the collapse of the USSR in 1991. However, the pleasure they took from China’s growing integration into the US-superintended world economic system soon turned sour as China began to use its new-found economic prowess to challenge the US. 
Starting in the 2010s, alarm bells about China’s growing threat to the US began to ring in Washington. Chinese companies were now marching into markets in Central and Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia that the US once regarded as its exclusive domain. China was now using loans to entice formerly Western-aligned nations closer to it. China was no longer restricted to low-end household goods but was now using its growing pool of skilled engineers to design and manufacture high-end, technology-intensive products matching US and European standards. With Western economies advancing only sluggishly after the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s rapid rebound and annual growth of up to 12 percent only highlighted the US’s relative decline. The country that the US had helped grow to world status was now coming back to bite it.
Just as threatening to the US were China’s moves to use its economic and technological advancement to build a military force capable of pushing the US out of the South China Sea, a region the US had dominated since the Pacific War, and which was now the most dynamic in the world. China has built a navy and a fleet of sophisticated jet fighters capable of reaching far from its shores. It is establishing military outposts on shoals and islets in the South China Sea. It is carrying out flyovers and naval missions close to Taiwan’s shores to forestall any moves by Taiwan to independence and to prepare to blockade or invade the island at some point. China has developed missiles capable of sinking US aircraft carriers. While China lacks the deep and broad relations the US enjoys with many nations in the Asia Pacific, the CCP is trying to remedy its soft power deficit through increased financial, trade and military ties with island nations in the south and south-west Pacific, seeking to edge out traditional relations with the US and its allies, including Australia. 
The US maintains a military lead over China, but the global nature of its imperial interests is also a weakness. It may outspend China on its military by nearly three to one, but its forces are stretched across several continents. Chinese imperialism, by contrast, is focused on domination closer to home in the South China Sea. The US’s difficulties in supplying Ukraine with war materiel in its war with Russia indicate problems in its defence industrial capacity at home. Much US military spending is wasted on weapons systems that are already obsolete by the time they roll off the production line. Long-term offshoring of production of vital components for the war machine, including to China itself, has become a big concern for the Pentagon.
China’s challenge to US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific has dominated US foreign and defence policy for 15 years, from presidents Barack Obama to Joe Biden. It lies at the heart of successive US national security and national defence policy documents. It explains Obama’s 2012 call for a “pivot to Asia” whereby 60 percent of the US Navy would be deployed to the Asia-Pacific. It underpinned Biden’s bid to build alliances to defend the so-called international rules-based order threatened by the “autocracies” of China and Russia. It helps explain growing US military spending and its withdrawal from the Middle East following the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. 
“Make America Great Again” is a program to prepare the US to fight and win a war with China. It is not only that; there are plenty of right-wing causes to be pursued, such as hostility to vaccinations, that do not have a direct or necessary military connection, but the overall direction is clear. 
Most obviously, there are tariffs and other incentives to encourage US companies to shut down industrial and IT production in China or areas such as Taiwan that are vulnerable to China and bring it home. Such a move would normally be financially unsustainable for many US companies since the cost of doing business is so much higher in the US. Trump’s solution is to try to slash the cost of doing business in the US, with the working class paying the price. What may simply look like gifts to his business mates, such as big corporate tax cuts, the savaging of the IRS, deregulation of environmental and labour provisions, the dismantling of the National Labor Relations Board and the invitation to fossil fuel companies to “drill, baby, drill”, are all aimed at incentivising US companies to rebuild the US’s industrial base.
Preparing for war is not just a matter of military hardware. It also involves rallying the population. This explains Trump’s ideological offensive against “woke”, DEI, trans rights and “cultural Marxism”. In their place, Trump and his cabinet want a patriotic population that evinces a willingness to fight and die for the country. They admire Israel with its highly militarised society and a big majority of the Jewish population fanatically devoted to wiping out the Palestinians. They want, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it, “to revive the warrior ethos”. If successful, this will have the added benefit of breaking political opposition at home and intimidating the working class, making easier the job of driving down wages and conditions and sacking workers.
Imperialist competition forces the contending powers to begin to mirror each other. So, in both the US and China, we see a repressive and reactionary government, the purging of dissent within and without the state machine, an incessant propaganda effort dedicated to fostering patriotism and “traditional values” and the diversion of funds from civilian to military use.
Trump and his loyal appointees in the state apparatus probably understand the opportunity that now lies open. It is not just Trump’s shock and awe tactics, the disarray in the ranks of his liberal opponents, his domination of the Republican Party, his control over both houses of Congress and the support of a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. The broader geopolitical situation also favours his initiatives to re-establish US power. US imperialism is currently enjoying some respite from its relative decline in the past two decades. In the Middle East, the US’s chief ally, Israel, has enjoyed a string of victories over Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Iran has been further weakened by the fall of longstanding ally Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. 
In Europe, the cards are also falling the US’s way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s economic stagnation have highlighted Europe’s dependence on the US. Trump is now seeking to exploit this as he opens closer relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and tells his NATO European allies to fend for themselves. If this comes to pass, the US will be free to redeploy some of its extensive military assets currently based in Europe to the Asia Pacific, where China continues to increase its imperialist presence.
Then there is the changing political alignment in Europe. Members of the hard right who identify with Trump are on the rise, while the centrist parties that long championed the so-called liberal world order are suffering serious electoral losses and, in some cases, forming blocs with the Trumpian hard right.
And finally, there is the US’s emergence as one of the world’s largest energy exporters, a position it can use as leverage against friends and foes alike.
This, then, is Trump’s project in its essentials. It is important to note, however, that it may not succeed. His coalition of supporters and financiers comprises various forces that do not all see eye to eye. The component parts of MAGA are unpopular among broad swathes of the population, and the president faces mid-term elections in November next year that may result in him losing his double majority in Congress—that is, if he is not stopped by a popular backlash in the workplaces and streets before then. Important sections of the capitalist class are suspending judgement on the program, particularly the attempt to unwind global flows of capital and trade. Growing interest repayments on government debt weigh on the budget, sticky inflation limits the Fed’s ability to cut interest rates, and a full-blown trade war could seriously damage the US economy. Nonetheless, this is the direction of travel in which Trump and his allies wish to take the country, and whatever reservations some capitalists and senior functionaries in the military and public service may have, they share with Trump a belief that the status quo is not working and things must change.
None of this is to say that war with China is about to break out. Both sides understand they are currently not prepared for one. But history has shown that the most dangerous times are those when a rising power challenges the hitherto dominant power. The last time a dominant global power—Britain—faltered, the instability and rivalry resulted in two world wars and fascism in Europe. This is hardly a prospect that should give us any comfort.

Behind the chaos, Trump prepares to take on China

US President Donald Trump has reduced the Western establishment’s liberal imperialist wing to a blubbering heap. 
Even before the White House humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski, the Atlantic magazine was warning about “The End of the Postwar World” and the crumbling of the system of alliances “allowing democratic societies ... to prosper”. A teary-eyed Christoph Heusgen, long-time German diplomat and chair of the annual Munich Security Conference, bewailed Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech to the event last month as a “European nightmare” in the context of Trump’s proposals to end the war in Ukraine. 
The administration’s plan for Russian annexations and American plunder of mineral resources is undoubtedly abhorrent. <a href="https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/02/21/poll-%E2%85%94-of-ukrainians-back-zelenskyy-majority-rejects-us-russia-talks-and-no-guarantees-ceasefire/">According to Rating Group</a>, a Ukrainian pollster, only 1 percent of Ukrainians support accepting Russian conditions to end the war. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin plan to carve up Ukraine against the will of its population, normalise expansionist imperialism and trample the right to national self-determination.
But the waterworks from Europe’s ruling classes have nothing to do with genuine concern for human rights. The first rumblings of official unease with Trump did not come in response to his mass expulsion idea for Gaza, his plans for mass deportations of migrants in the US or his collaboration with the Hitler-saluting Elon Musk. 
Moreover, British and American leaders happily supported Russian barbarism in the contested region of Chechnya when that suited their interests. Western backing for Ukraine against Russia was always about strengthening ties between US and European imperialism—but now, Europe’s leaders are increasingly anxious about their own position within the existing imperialist hierarchy. 
The Munich Security Conference exemplifies the favoured branding of post-war capitalism known as the “liberal rules-based order”. We should shed no tears for an order that brought us the invasion of Iraq and the genocide in Gaza. The West’s professed love for democracy hasn’t stopped its flirtations with dictators from Pinochet to bin Salman. And despite all that they preached about the Second World War being fought against Hitler and fascism, the Allies stood aside as General Franco imposed a military junta on Spain, and they assisted Nazi collaborators in Greece. 
Assembled at Munich were the remaining dregs of the European political establishment not already overrun by a new, 21st-century wave of far-right forces. They covet American military protection from their aggressive Russian neighbour. Since 1945, their alliance has functioned under the guise of “shared democratic values”. But all that waffle was underpinned by the “percentages agreement” between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, dividing Europe into spheres of influence without the slightest regard for the opinions of the people to be ruled by one or the other of the imperialist blocs.
Vance’s speech made it clear that Washington will no longer operate within the post-WWII ideological framework. The second Trump administration intends to bolster illiberal far-right parties and authoritarian regimes across the Atlantic. “[What] I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia”, Vance teased. “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its ... values shared with the United States of America.”
Vance charged that “across Europe, free speech ... is in retreat”, citing a few examples when police have prosecuted “anti-feminist” and Islamophobic activists. The reality, of course, is that far-right provocateurs and activists are ascendant, catapulted forward by the ever-deepening chauvinism of establishment capitalist politics. What upset the audience at Munich was that Vance turned capitalist sanctimony about “freedom” and “democracy” on its head.
Vance’s message was that more governments should follow Trump’s lead and discard the liberal rhetoric they regularly use to legitimise their rule. Vance quipped that “there’s a new sheriff in town”, and he wants to bring the system’s most brutish dynamics out into the open. He hailed a recent move by German conservatives to work with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on border controls. “There is no room for firewalls”, Vance insisted, referring to entrenched German parliamentary taboos against collaborating with fascists.
The new administration in Washington wants fewer restrictions on fascist organising and more alliances between traditional conservatives and the electoral far right. After all, Make America Great Again began as a project inside one of the main parties of US capitalism and now counts Hitler-saluting adherents among its key personnel. 
The pro-Russia sentiment in Vance’s polemic poured salt on the wounds, and not just because Putin is a traditional enemy of European states. The war in Ukraine has become a rallying point for the far right over the past three years precisely because of the ideological narratives constructed around it by the liberal establishment. 
Biden and NATO cynically presented the conflict as a war between the “democratic” West and authoritarian Russia. In this clash of civilisations, the far right unsurprisingly chose to side with Moscow’s openly authoritarian regime. For many European far-right parties, as well as for many US Republicans, Putin’s ultraconservative strongman style is a model for pushing back liberal social attitudes.
Trump’s punitive approach to Ukraine and his warmth towards Putin reflect political sympathies for the Russian despot. And Vance’s references to Russia made clear that America is on the side of the European far right, not the European establishment. As the vice president departed to meet AfD leader Alice Weidel, he left the assemblage of ruling class representatives in Munich grieving. “We have to fear,” said Heusgen, “that our common value base is not that common anymore”. 
The values of status quo capitalism deserve no lamentation. But Trump and his supporters are determined to usher in a new order of fascistic brutality and open imperialist aggression. In foreign policy and when it comes to civil liberties in the West, Trump’s administration wants a world in which might makes right. 
Faced with a new far-right onslaught, we cannot rely on the snivelling hypocrites currently grumbling about Ukraine. They created the order out of which fascism and authoritarianism have again reared their monstrous heads.

Ruby Healer

Crocodile tears for Ukraine won’t stop the far right

US President Donald Trump has declared his intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population. Trump outlined his genocidal vision during a grotesque press conference, standing alongside a smirking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has overseen the massacre of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, and who has an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued against him for war crimes.
Trump justified his calls for the annihilation of the Palestinian people from their homeland by describing the complete devastation that has been wrought on Gaza—devastation caused by the man grinning next to him, and by the US itself which has supplied Israel with the weaponry to destroy Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools and all other civilian infrastructure.
As if ethnic cleansing wasn’t bad enough, Trump added his own billionaire-parasite twist, declaring that the US would “own” Gaza, and that he would turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace put it succinctly: “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago”. 
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has kept his knee bent before the hard-right US president by refusing to condemn these open calls for genocide. Albanese said he “would not give a daily commentary on statements by the US President”. Even spineless world leaders who have been lining up to kiss Trump’s arse, like the UK’s Keir Starmer, have at least verbally rebuked his calls for ethnic cleansing. Not so Albanese, who is setting new standards for pathetic capitulation to the far right. 
Trump’s open support for the total removal of Palestinians from Gaza puts much of the political and media establishment in Australia and around the world in a bit of a quandary. They continued to support Israel through sixteen months of its genocide in Gaza, no matter how many children were massacred. They have dehumanised the Palestinian people and engaged in an escalating campaign of slandering, sacking and repressing those who speak up for the Palestinians, from journalists and academics to students and protest organisers. But most of this has happened under the official pretence that Israel was “defending itself”, accompanied by weasel words from former US President Joe Biden and Albanese pretending that they wanted peace and a two-state solution, and a compliant media who presented this fairytale as though it were real. Netanyahu knows this game well; he knows that to get away with genocide it’s best to deny that is what you’re doing.
Trump has shattered that pretence. He has said out loud what has been Israel and the US’s policy all along, obvious to anyone who wanted to see, yet officially denied: wiping out the Palestinian people. That’s what the last sixteen months have been about, and the US and Australia have provided the arms to do it.
The media’s reaction has been mixed, reflecting this quandary of how to deal with a US president who makes it harder to justify the rotten system we live in. Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph ran an opinion piece titled “Can Trump’s plan to level Gaza finally bring peace?”. Pondering about whether genocide equals peace was a bridge too far for most, though, who have instead tried to reassure us that Trump’s statements are “outlandish” and unrealisable. 
But the genocide in Gaza is not outlandish. It has been happening. And Trump’s statements have effectively ripped up the ceasefire deal and given Netanyahu the green light to resume the slaughter in coming months. They must be stopped.

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Behind the chaos, Trump prepares to take on China

Crocodile tears for Ukraine won’t stop the far right

Trump spells out plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza

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