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

As the Trump administration tears through the US, deporting, sacking and ripping up decades of social progress, the Democratic Party has been playing dead. This is no exaggeration—in a New York Times piece published in late February, longtime Democratic strategist James Carville argues: “With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political manoeuvre in the history of our party: roll over”. Essentially, Democrats shouldn’t lift a finger to obstruct Trump’s agenda, and simply wait until he runs out of steam. Tough luck if you’re one of the people Trump plans on running down before the next election. 
The Democrats have been displaying more weaponised incompetence than a dud husband. In a moment that symbolised the party’s stance, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries threw his hands in the air at a February press conference and asked, “What leverage do we have? ...They control the House, the Senate and the presidency; it's their government”. For a party that has spent the last decade staking its legitimacy on being the only viable bulwark against Trumpism, this has not been a good look. 
A recent survey by polling firm Data for Progress showed that 70 percent of Democratic voters gave the party’s response to Trump a “C” grade or below, 21 percent assigning a failing grade. Another from the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini shows that nearly 80 percent of Democrats want the party to take a more combative approach to the president. No wonder they’ve enjoyed <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/16/politics/cnn-poll-democrats/index.html">record low</a> approval ratings, even as Trump’s popularity dips. 
But now Democrats are starting to look alive as the Trump administration hits bumpy roads. One leading elected official is taking calls from the party’s supporters to stand up to Trump literally—last week, Cory Booker stood to excoriate Trump for 25 hours straight, in the longest speech ever delivered to Congress. Booker has been widely praised for this political stunt. In the words of one supporter, a small business owner quoted in the New York Times, “The Democrats have been acting like it’s OK what Trump is doing, and it’s not OK ... Now, there’s finally some fire”. 
Democrats have drawn encouragement from their victory in a race for a vacant Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin—a campaign into which Musk unsuccessfully ploughed $25 million of his own money. Two special elections in Florida returned Republicans to Congress, but with drastically reduced margins. On the left flank of the party, “Fight the oligarchy” rallies headed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing enormous crowds that dwarf Trump’s 2024 campaign rallies. The “Hands Off” protests against Trump and Musk on 5 April, which mobilised millions across more than 1,200 locations, were used as a platform by Democrat representatives keen to relate to the anti-Trump feeling. 
It’s good that there is more push back against Trump. This can help cut through the climate of intimidation the administration is seeking to create, and give people more confidence to stand up. But the Democrats don’t offer an alternative worth getting behind. 
The Democrats agree with many of the worst aspects of Trump’s politics. In 25 hours of speechifying against Trump, Booker declined to mention the administration’s support for the resumption of genocide in Gaza since Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire deal in March. This is because Booker, like the overwhelming majority of Democrat representatives, is a loyal supporter of Israel’s offensive against the Palestinians. While denouncing Trump’s disregard for the “rule of law”, he happily poses for photographs with former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who is subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including using starvation as a method of warfare. 
Booker’s speech neglected to mention the violation of the legal rights of student activists like Mahmoud Khalil, who has been kidnapped by ICE and faces deportation for protesting. When the Palestinian American representative Rashida Tlaib initiated an open letter demanding the release of Khalil, a legal permanent resident who has not had any charges filed against him, only 14 of 213 Democrats in the House were willing to sign it. 
Democratic accordance with Trump’s agenda goes beyond the party’s support for Israel. Trump’s very first anti-migrant bill, giving ICE more powers to detain and deport, was passed with Democrat votes. On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris attacked Trump for failing to support a Democrat-backed bill to hire 1,500 more border cops. 
Post-election soul-searching among Democrats has resulted in a variety of different conclusions. Democrats lost to an unpopular candidate whose last term ended in chaos and embarrassment. Many are envious of the enthusiasm Trump inspires, while Harris lost 6.8 million votes compared to Biden’s 2020 result. 
Unwilling to break with the pro-business and anti-worker policies that have steadily undermined their support, leading Democrats have decided to pin blame for their loss on the left. According to Democrat strategist Stuart Malec’s implausible account, the problem is: “In the name of keeping the peace internally, we have allowed politicians and activist groups from our left-most flank to seize an outsized role in defining the party’s national brand”. He argues Democrats have been shamed out of proudly trumpeting Biden’s many achievements, such as massively expanding fossil fuel extraction and deporting record numbers of migrants. Talking tough against the tiny US left is a lot easier than standing up to Trump or the billionaires. 
Following this line of argument, many leading Democrats are now championing the Trumpist claim that “wokeness” has gone too far. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has recently complained that “We’ve gone through five years where people became way too permissive as a culture”. In an <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-28/newsom-podcast-democrats-toxic">interview with the LA Times</a>, California Governor Gavin Newsom said his party’s brand had become “toxic”. “People don’t think we make any damn sense”, he said. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/democrats-blame-partys-position-transgender-rights-part-harris-loss-rcna179370">Rep. Tom Suozzi</a> of New York slammed Democrats for “pandering to the far left” on trans rights. 
Democrats who argue the party has gone too far in supporting social justice frequently frame this retreat as a turn back to “bread and butter” issues. But the same Democrats who urge this back-to-basics approach are hostile to workers’ rights and the welfare state. Emanuel, for instance, spent his time as Chicago mayor attempting to crush teachers’ unions and close public schools. 
Democrats can comfortably agree with war, deportations, bigotry and austerity. Their fundamental problem with Trump is that he’s an unreliable and erratic enforcer of the interests of American capitalism. The Democrats’ criticism of Trump is tied to the growing chorus of capitalists who are concerned he is doing irreparable damage to their system. Wall Street billionaires are infuriated by Trump’s tariff gambit: Bill Ackman said the US is “heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter”. Boaz Weinstein predicted the “avalanche has really just started”. And Jamie Dimon warned it “may be disastrous in the long run”. 
This chorus also includes sections of the US imperialist establishment, like ex-Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, who are concerned Trump’s crude and blustering approach to foreign policy risks undermining US imperialist influence. This explains the furore around
“Signalgate”, when Trump’s team accidentally added an Atlantic journalist to their group chat discussing military strikes on Yemen. Democrats condemned Trump, not for bombing a poor country and slaughtering civilians, but for letting the world know about it. Traditionalists through and through, the Democratic Party prefer US war crimes to be kept secret. 
This is why their dominant strategy for “resisting” Trump thus far has been an endless series of legal challenges. The balance sheet of this strategy has been dismal. While court cases may temporarily halt some of Trump’s agenda, the administration is intimidating judges and moving rapidly toward defying their orders. This strategy does nothing to mobilise people to resist attacks or provide people with a coherent political argument against the right.
The huge turnouts at anti-Trump demonstrations on 5 April show that millions are looking for a way to resist Trump’s agenda effectively. While many are frustrated with the Democrats’ leadership, the party isn’t going anywhere. The Democrats hold on because of the strength of “lesser-evilism”, the pull for people to rally around the Democrats because they’re the only viable electoral alternative. Many accept a pathetic and pro-capitalist “resistance” to Trumpism even when they would prefer something better. So Democrats were able to front the 5 April demonstrations to begin rebuilding their credibility after a bruising few months. They were also able to exert influence through the party-aligned NGOs that organised the marches to exclude “controversial” issues like Palestine from the platform. 
The popularity of the “Fight the oligarchy” campaign led by Sanders and AOC shows that many support the idea of a left-wing resistance to Trump’s agenda. Their rally in Denver on 21 March drew 34,000 people and connected Trump’s reactionary social agenda to his war on workers. “People are starting to put the pieces together. The same billionaires who are taking a wrecking ball to our country derive their power from dividing working people apart”, said Ocasio-Cortez. “The last thing they want is for us to realize that the real division and the real harm in this country is how endless greed is costing the lives of everyone else.”
This is a good starting point for a socialist opposition to Trumpism. But it needs to be connected to a strategy that can actually build the power of workers and the oppressed. While they talk about fighting the oligarchy, AOC and Bernie urge support for the Democratic Party, an irredeemably oligarchic organisation. 
The alternative to this is to build grassroots organisations that can mobilise opposition to Trump and involve people in political action, to build working class power at the point of production and to cohere a political force that has an orientation to the power workers and the oppressed have when they act together.

Luca Tavan

Don’t trust the Democrats, we need real resistance to Trump

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

US President Donald Trump’s first reign ended in flailing catastrophe. He was like a bad comic being booed off the stage. He was beaten fair and square by a demented, basement-dwelling Biden. His attempted self-coup was a discrediting farce: he was supported by no army divisions, but only the QAnon shaman. His cultural legacy was enormous yet seemed to leave little structural trace. 
He is back now, and different. He has already created a climate of fear. Political opponents have been disappeared off the streets, and he has hundreds of victims in a Salvadoran gulag. Universities have rolled over. Big law firms have pledged to give pro bono advice to help him repress the enemy within. His sadistic cuts to state programs aim to call into question the legitimacy of any regulation, any redistribution or any orderly administration of a big bourgeois state. How far can it go? Where can it end? What limits exist to this process?
In some ways, Trump’s first term concealed his true nature. The radical demagogue, who inspired the world’s fascists, was almost immediately bound by circumstance. When he came to power, his own party tried to constrain and control him. Throughout his first months in office, appointees rebelled, or he fired them. Scaramucci, Spicer, Flynn, Bolton—the whole gamut from ultra-Trump spivs to neocon fossils—came and went in a laughable whirlwind. The Democrats took back the Congress. Black Lives Matter was simply too big to repress; it meant that Trump’s first term was defined by a progressive movement of astonishing breadth and persistence, with enormous immediate cultural impact. 
“Trump’s famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency, have been subverted at every level”, Tucker Carlson complained when Black Lives Matter left Trump and the Republicans passive and irrelevant. COVID exposed Trump’s sheer personal stupidity. He was publicly mocked and deflated by his own scientists. The need for state intervention into the economy was made screechingly obvious. Trumpism appeared to have been refuted by reality.
Yet all this concealed an inner development. On another level, Trump was gaining in power—and radicalising.
Trump didn’t win in 2016 by accident. He had proved himself a campaigner of some genius. He could take power and give it to allies. Over time, more and more ambitious politicians came over to his faction. In 2016, he had few reliable, sophisticated allies; now, he controls the entire Republican Party at every level. In Project 2025, top policy minds provided a program and tactical outline for a radicalised reactionary presidency. Trump showed how a president could win while breaking the rules and defying the norms; for right-wingers, that opened up new and exciting possibilities.
Black Lives Matter made Trump seem weak while the protests were at their peak. But they also inspired a deep, violent racist reaction. In the same screed in which he bemoaned the failure of Trump’s instincts, Carlson explained to his audience of millions: “Our leaders are weak. Predators know it. That’s why this is happening”. What was needed? “American citizens are forced to defend themselves. They have no choice. No-one else is going to defend them.”
At the time, Trump was asking Defense Secretary Mark Esper if the army could be ordered to fire into the crowds. The answer was no. But the idea was there. Soon, the killer Kyle Rittenhouse would become a Republican hero, to be joined by Daniel Penny and even Derek Chauvin, the man who choked George Floyd, and for whom Elon Musk now wants a pardon. The protests at elite universities in solidarity with Palestine gave further drive to this current: use terror to crush anti-racist ideology, or future State Departmentemployees will sympathise with the enemy. Internal repression and imperial violence could come together—just like at the peak of the Cold War.
The pandemic had made Trump seem weak, but that radicalised his movement as well. Huge swathes of capitalists—not just Americans, but throughout the world—lived their worst nightmare: their system was paused to save people’s lives. For many, not least Elon Musk, the lesson was clear. Whatever it took—whatever mad ideas, whatever political alliances, whatever cost in human lives—regulation in general, and disease control in particular, had to be crushed.
The way that COVID radicalised capitalists has been too little discussed. Centre-left parties are embarrassed to mention it, and right-wing ones have largely embraced the insanity. When Trump ran for re-election, he had the support of a business community that had consciously decided to embrace far-right conspiracies and kill by disease if it meant they could wind back regulations and reduce taxes.
Here is the domestic program of Trump 2.0: repress dissent, merge state violence with mob rule and shift the class struggle in favour of the bosses. These factors coalesce against a Democratic Party with little to offer. Trump is not coasting; he is not just kicking the can down the road for another few years. He wants to change the world.
And he has what he needs to do it. He represents a section of the capitalist class that is willing to fight. He has thousands of trained, confident and energetic activists, inspired by a worldview and a vision of the future. He has a political party—though a strange one, in the American model—through which he can coordinate and implement his program. What, then, can stop it?
Don’t look to America’s great traditions. Trump is a radical, but he is also a traditionalist. His terroristic internal program, and the forces that drive it, have deep roots in US political structures—deeper, in many ways, than Biden’s bumbling liberalism. The history of the USA is, in large part, a history of violent state terror meted out at Blacks, immigrants, leftists and the poor. Some of the methods were direct state power: executions, deportations and mass imprisonment. 
The first Red Scare deported hundreds of radical “aliens” from the country in the years following World War One. The Smith Act of 1940 made radical politics a crime, and socialists were jailed under it. A follow-up, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, allowed radicals to be deprived of their residency rights and deported—just as Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are doing now. 
Showpiece executions—like that of the Rosenbergs in 1953—created an aura of dread that could pervade society. In the early Cold War, “loyalty boards” investigated, disciplined and blacklisted employees suspected of radical ideas or simply of supporting the free speech and civil rights of radicals.
However, repression in the USA is traditionally decentralised. Employers and intellectuals can see which way the wind is blowing and play along. Joseph McCarthy’s public hearings could imprison victims if they didn’t provide testimony. But they also gave a signal to private employers about who they should blacklist, and how they should terrorise their own workers. The state “loyalty boards” gave legitimacy to bosses purging “disloyal” or rebellious employees. Anyone who caused trouble—organising a union, denouncing McCarthy or opposing racism—could be denounced for their radicalism and sacked. 
It was a very effective way to crush the trade unions and enforce the bosses’ domination over the working class. In shipyards, dock workers were purged and blacklisted for failing to give correct answers to questions like, “What do you think of the Italian situation?” or “Does your wife go to church regularly?” The purge of the ports was particularly intense: any active trade union militant was a suspect. In another pernicious US tradition, anti-communist union bureaucrats enthusiastically helped management drive out unruly workers, collaborating in investigations and helping to pick targets.
Binding the public and private repression is the US tradition of the private death squad. The roots go deep, at least back to the Klan in the period after the Civil War. It’s familiar to most from the civil rights struggle: the lynchings, the church bombings, the kidnap and torture of Freedom Riders. Racism almost always helped justify the murders, beatings and bombings, even when the victims were white—because white subversives were disloyal to the race. Private killers often knew the state would turn a blind eye. These private killers overlapped with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which for decades was run as an internal political police—blackmailing, brutalising and in some cases probably assassinating subversives beyond any regular legal framework.
For much of the twentieth century, the US was a deeply authoritarian society. In parts of the country, it was a one-party state. Many of its policies were inspirational to European fascist regimes. Yet it was all established and maintained without any open coup, any apparent “revolution”, or any Nazi-style party in uniforms: it always called itself democracy, not totalitarianism. The American authoritarian tradition, on which Trump draws, operated through a patchwork collaboration of state institutions, bosses, right-wing union officials and private thugs.
Trump draws on that tradition, but it’s unclear if he can completely re-establish it. It’s one thing to maintain a violent and authoritarian society that has existed for decades; it’s another to recreate and reimpose it once it has been largely vanquished. Resistance is likely, and Trump’s institutional capacity to hold the line is unknown.
But the authoritarian history of the US shows that faith in the “democratic resilience” of the US or its liberal institutions is misguided. For most of its history, the country has been nominally democratic but substantially authoritarian. In times of repression, liberal institutions caved, or joined in, seeking their own advantage. Trump’s project is serious. He has a vision, he has activists, he has organisation and he has the backing of an aggressive class that wants to fight. To resist his attacks, our side needs the same.

D. Taylor

Trump 2.0 is reviving America’s worst traditions. How far can it go?

Resistance returned to the streets of Türkiye following the 19 March arrest of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main political rival. İmamoğlu’s university degree had already been annulled, preventing him from standing in the 2028 presidential election. He was subsequently arrested on charges of terrorism and corruption by a politically motivated court ruling. Mass protests have since erupted nationwide to protect the right to free elections and democracy. 
Millions of people have participated in protests in most Turkish provinces. Students and young people, who have grown up under the rule of Erdoğan, are the main drivers of the movement and have organised a boycott of government-aligned businesses. The police have arrested thousands and imprisoned hundreds, focusing their attention on socialists, leftists and unionists. Prosecutors are now on the hunt for those encouraging the boycott. Defying the repression, actions continue.
Red Flag’s Can Yilmaz interviewed the leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SEP) Güneş Gümüş to discuss the developments and the left’s role in them.
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President Erdoğan has been in power for more than twenty years. How much has he changed Turkish politics and what’s behind the current crisis?
Since coming to power in 2002, Erdoğan has gradually built an authoritarian regime. He already controls the state apparatus—the military, police, judiciary, media and universities. Thousands of dissidents are currently in prison. Any serious opposition voice can be jailed simply by accusing them of “terrorism”. But the AKP’s [the conservative Justice and Development Party, which Erdoğan leads] latest move represents a qualitative leap in building an authoritarian regime.
Despite past interruptions by coups, Turkey had an 80-year history of multi-party democracy and a tradition of governments changing through elections. In the 2024 local elections, the AKP lost almost all major municipalities. Most state resources are now under CHP [the Republican People’s Party, a secular nationalist party founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Türkiye] control. Some CHP figures became serious rivals to Erdoğan. Turkish society is dynamic—young people have largely broken from the AKP, and its social base is shrinking.
These concerns drove the AKP to a kind of coup. What they are now trying to establish is a fully authoritarian regime—a Putin-style system where elections exist only on paper. A silent society under an autocracy with opposition leaders sidelined: this is their goal.
How sizeable are the demonstrations and how severely are they being repressed? What is the political significance of these developments?
Millions have taken to the streets. The driving force of the protests is university students and youth. For some time, young people have been leaving the country. Injustice, unemployment, impoverishment, repression, favouritism—this is the only reality for someone in their early 20s. They’ve seen no government other than Erdoğan’s, and things keep getting worse Eventually, this angry generation exploded.
No-one—including us—predicted the protests would grow so quickly. Erdoğan has not yet managed to fully establish the authoritarian regime he desires because strong pockets of resistance have always emerged. This wave of mass protests came as a rebellion of a generation previously thought to have been subdued. The moment the first police barricade was breached, a psychological threshold was crossed—and Erdoğan was forced to step back.
The protest wave, led by the three largest cities, has put pressure on the bourgeois opposition. Police were forced to retreat in many places, but where protester numbers increased or they attempted to break through barricades, police responded with extreme violence. Erdoğan also employed another tactic: every morning for a week, protesters’ homes were raided, and arrests were made daily. Using media power, the protests and protesters were criminalised. In total, 2,600 people were detained, more than 300 imprisoned, and dozens placed under house arrest.
The most important outcome so far is that Erdoğan, unexpectedly, had to hit the brakes. A trustee couldn’t be appointed to the İstanbul Municipality. Some of Erdoğan’s planned moves may also have been postponed—we’ll see in time. But we know this: Erdoğan is determined to go all the way. 
How does this moment compare to previous instances of resistance, such as the 2013 Gezi Park protests?
University students are playing a much more decisive role in the struggle. The average age is much younger. In 2013, the broader opposition was more self-confident, and people of all ages participated in the protests. Neighbourhood-based local protests were widespread—even small cities saw large demonstrations. Today, fear is more prevalent, so middle-aged and older generations are more hesitant. Still, over 2 million people joined a large, low-risk CHP-organised demonstration in İstanbul.
In 2013, Erdoğan’s polarisation strategy worked—half the country was still behind him, the other half on the streets. Today, the AKP’s support base has shrunk significantly, and Erdoğan is even struggling to consolidate that. In 2013, police violence was more brutal—10 protesters were killed. This time, despite pressure to crack down, police have been relatively softer in some cases.
The socialist left was larger in 2013 and had more influence on the movement. Today, right-wing Kemalist influence is stronger among the youth. Still, socialist groups—including the SEP’s youth organisation Marxist Thought Communities—remain influential in protest and boycott committees. Middle East Technical University, a historical stronghold of the socialist left, has had a nationwide impact once again.
Back then, pessimism wasn’t as deep. But the extraordinary years that followed 2013 led to the withdrawal of a generation and weakened the socialist left. Now, a new generation has emerged.
The key continuity between 2013 and 2025 is the defence of democratic rights against AKP authoritarianism. The defence of secularism—and the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—continues. Another continuity is the absence of the working-class movement from the struggle. Despite some significant labour strikes today, they remain localised and focused on economic demands, not political ones.
The class dynamic also plays a major role in why the youth are so determined and at the forefront. They don’t believe they have a future in Turkey and are resisting the transformation of their country into a typical Middle Eastern-style tyranny. Democratic rights and freedoms are among their most basic demands.
What’s the role of the left? How has your group the SEP and other socialist groups been active? 
The left has significantly shrunk and lost influence over the past decades due to ideological defeats and pressure from the regime. Identity politics became central, leaving the working class vulnerable to either Islamism or despair. With a few exceptions, universities are now dominated by state-supported fascist groups.
Still, the radical left has influence in a few key universities and youth centres. It has an outsized impact compared to its numerical strength. For example, the first protest that sparked the uprising was organised by socialists, including us. We play critical roles in organising university boycotts and unifying the student movement in city centres.
Socialists have played decisive roles at key moments and places, but we need to build a united front to sustain momentum. We must bring in the power of the working class and the grievances of the poor. We are working within the unions where we are active to build pressure for participation in the movement.
What other organised political groups are taking part in the actions? Is there a clear leadership to the movement?
 
The movement is heterogeneous and scattered. On the streets, you can find ultra-nationalist youth, Kemalists, and left-leaning students united by their hatred for Erdoğan’s regime. Almost all socialist and left groups are involved. But there’s one critical exception: the leadership of the Kurdish political movement. They’ve been engaged in negotiations with the state regarding disarmament of the PKK [the Kurdistan Workers’ Party]. Within this framework, they and the socialist groups aligned with them, including the unions they influence, have deliberately stayed out of the protests. 
Another group absent from the demonstrations was the Communist Party of Turkey. Despite the massive nature of the revolt, they initially avoided joining, making political statements to justify their inaction. But under grassroots pressure, they were eventually forced to participate in a controlled way.
It seems the question of what to do next is causing some debate. What are people arguing about where to go from here?
SEP advocates for strengthening the boycott committees at universities, establishing local committees in neighbourhoods and workplaces, and building a non-bureaucratic organisational structure that sustains the movement through concrete campaigns.
The economic crisis is the country’s most fundamental issue. The movement needs to incorporate economic demands. Also, 301 students, leftists and unionists are still in prison, with hundreds under house arrest. We need solidarity networks and a campaign for their release.
While a general strike is not realistic at this point, it’s vital to appeal to the working class and embed demands that resonate with them. Right now, consumer boycotts are the most widespread form of protest among the public. CHP is calling for boycotts of companies close to the AKP. On social media, calls for boycotting shopping are gaining traction.
People are discussing how Turkey lacks oil or other internal resources to finance authoritarianism, making it vulnerable to consumer boycotts. But we argue that producer strikes, direct action, neighbourhood and workplace committees, and organised struggle—not consumer boycotts—will ultimately determine the outcome.
In what direction do you think the socialist movement and the labour movement should go?
The anger of the youth, the suffering of the working class, and the Kurdish people’s desire for freedom all point to the need for a revolutionary solution. Existing left organisations are bureaucratic, closely tied to the system and, unfortunately, have lost their class perspective and character. As a result, they can’t go beyond defending the democratic space or develop more advanced strategies for struggle. Now that the masses are beginning to push beyond those limits, we must organise a new revolutionary generation out of this movement.

Can Yilmaz

Erdoğan’s attack on democratic rights sparks mass protests in Türkiye

The Canadian response to US President Donald Trump’s trade war is a case study of how nationalism can deflect criticism from the local ruling classes and paper over some of society’s class tensions. The overall result is a more right-wing environment in which dissatisfaction with the cost of living has collapsed into support for Canadian nationalism.
Trump’s America First plan is to realign international economic and political relations to benefit the US. In the Canadian context, Trump is using the country’s reliance on the US economy to extract political and economic concessions.
The tit-for-tat tariff war began in late January with the announcement of 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Trump’s deceptive justification for the tariffs, laid out in a White House Press release, was to crack down on undocumented migration and fentanyl smuggling. In response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau beefed up border security and used the situation to deflect anger at the cost-of-living crisis away from the government. 
Trump’s moves have provoked a wave of nationalist sentiment. 
Formerly despised politicians are now lauded as national heroes. Just before Trump took office, Trudeau, a major advocate for austerity, had an approval rating of just 20 percent, according to a Guardian poll—down from a high of 65 percent. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the re-branded far-right Conservative Party of Canada, who was often dubbed “Trump Lite”, was leading in the same poll with 45 percent support. 
Now, their fortunes have reversed—the Conservatives are trailing in the polls after previously being considered shoo-ins to win the next election. And according to a new survey, published by Nanos in March, “dealing with US President Trump” is the most important issue for Canadian voters, ahead of the economy. That is also a shift—previously, the cost of living was front and centre as the most important issue.
Although Trudeau stepped down from the leadership of the Liberal Party shortly into the Trump presidency, his public perception has also turned around because of his vocal opposition to the tariffs. His successor, Mark Carney, a former investment banker, is capitalising on the shift in fortunes and has called a snap election. 
Formerly pilloried corporations have received a similar public rehabilitation. The “Buy Canadian Instead” campaign, for instance, was launched and backed by the grocery store mega-conglomerate Loblaws, which until recently was most known for having to pay a $50 million fine for price fixing. The Buy Canada campaign has proved lucrative: in the first week of February, CEO Per Bank told analysts that there had been a 10 percent uplift in sales of Canadian products.
This hasn’t done anything to solve the cost-of-living crisis, of course. But it gave the bosses an opportunity to pull the unions into a joint campaign to protect the interests of Canadian capitalists.
A press release from the Business Council of Canada announced the newly formed Canada-US Trade Council, which brings together “industry, unions and experts” to “secure [a] competitive business environment for our future”.
Even the supposedly social democratic New Democratic Party couldn’t sit out the nationalistic festivities. Party leader Jagmeet Singh has announced a plan to re-shore the production of F-35 fighter jets and new investments in “arctic sovereignty and defence”.
Fourteen CEOs representing Canada’s largest oil, gas and pipeline companies have petitioned the government to scrap certain environmental protections. They cite the urgent need to expand the energy sector to protect Canadian national sovereignty. 
In the global environment of increased economic and national competition, nationalism spins a narrative that workers and companies share common interests. 
It’s a scam to distract people from domestic inequality and exploitation, and will do nothing to ease living costs. Consumer prices, already under significant inflationary pressures, will continue to rise for working-class people, and the new intensely competitive environment will put more pressure on the Canadian ruling class to hammer through austerity, ramp up military spending and destroy existing environmental and workplace regulations.
The trade war is not about defending the standards of working-class people in each country; it’s about which national group of bosses will come out on top. Socialists should build solidarity across borders and oppose all attempts to impose the costs of the trade war on workers.

Dylan Vickers

Trade war spurs nationalism in Canada

It was a relief when, in December, Israel finally agreed to a ceasefire. It didn’t guarantee Palestinians access to aid and construction materials to rebuild their shattered homes. It didn’t address the structural injustice of millions of Gazans being unable to travel to see their families in the West Bank. It wasn’t going to liberate the thousands of Palestinian hostages being tortured in Israeli prisons. 
Yet it was impossible not to be moved by scenes of Gazans rejoicing at what was supposed to be the end of this historic slaughter, of hundreds of thousands commencing their slow march back to Gaza’s devastated northern region. 
Yet in just a few weeks, Netanyahu has taken any hope that Gaza could return to some semblance of normality and smashed it to pieces. Once again, the bombs are dropping on defenceless refugees. Israel made its intent clear by kicking off with a massacre of 400 people, nearly 200 of them children.
Israel’s military has now directly killed more than 50,000 people, according to the Gaza Ministry for Health. A figure that includes preventable losses due to sickness, starvation and other issues associated with the war and decades-long siege would be far higher, potentially over 200,000.
In typical form, much of the Western media repeated Netanyahu’s lies that it was Hamas that broke the ceasefire. But the truth is clear to anybody who cares to see, and has been discussed widely within Israel’s own press. Netanyahu needs the genocide to continue to keep his governmental coalition together.
In any case, the ceasefire was never real. Israeli forces killed at least 155 Gazans <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-israel-violate-gaza-ceasefire-new-escalation">throughout the truce period</a>. The ceasefire also brought a brutal escalation in Israel’s colonial efforts in the West Bank, with Jenin, Tulkarem and other villages besieged. This represented a crescendo of activity that began in the days after 7 October. A <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5873-israeli-settlements-occupied-palestinian-territory-including">report</a> released by the UN Human Rights Office on 18 March revealed that more than 20,000 new Jewish homes have been approved for construction in occupied East Jerusalem since that time, with another 10,000 more planned for the occupied West Bank. 
The same report also estimated that an unprecedented 49 new illegal outposts have been established, part of the steady integration of the West Bank into Israel. While former US President Joe Biden liked to pretend that these illegal activities are unrelated to official Israeli policy, the report also found that “the line between settler and state violence [has] blurred to a vanishing point”. 
The resumption of the war means attention will return to Gaza, where the possibilities for Israeli barbarism are endless. Well-informed commentators were speculating late last year that Israel was planning to occupy permanently at least some parts of Gaza, if not the whole strip. The topic was openly discussed in <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-11-01/ty-article-opinion/.premium/in-defense-of-the-generals-plan-laying-siege-to-israels-enemy-isnt-a-war-crime/00000192-e406-d2fe-affe-e76f2f410000">Haaretz</a> newspaper, for instance. 
It’s possible that the ceasefire was always conceived of as a momentary pause designed to give Trump a small boost, appease some of the pro-hostage sentiment in Israel and allow for serious preparations for a new attempt at ethnic cleansing. 
The US is certainly no barrier to this fascistic project. Indeed, not long after taking office, President Trump declared himself in favour of the total cleansing of Gaza, later re-posting a psychotic AI-generated video of the territory re-imagined as a holiday resort. Such a move would fit with Trump’s imperial vision of the world, where might makes right. 
The rest of the world has reacted to the renewal of Israel’s genocidal onslaught with utter indifference. Arab and Muslim leaders have said nothing, and done even less. Turkey’s Erdogan is too busy arresting opposition leaders and whipping up anti-refugee racism to speak up for Gaza. In any case, Turkey is part of the US global war machine via its membership of NATO, which makes his government utterly complicit in all that has taken place. 
The European powers are in a similar boat. They are hypocritically using Trump’s undermining of Ukraine to justify a historic boost in military spending while remaining unmoved by an actual genocide in Palestine. 
Here in Australia, the establishment has chosen to ignore the resumption of war. The media have run dead on the issue, and the political class are silent. On one level, it’s understandable, as recent events have made open promotion of Israel’s talking points somewhat difficult. 
It was a bit embarrassing (though unsurprising) when police revealed that the much-hyped surge of antisemitism in NSW was a total hoax. And now their darling Israel has broken yet another peace agreement, preferring to reopen a campaign of mass destruction.
Yet this silence confirms their despicable complicity. 
In light of that, it was heartening to see a substantially increased turnout at the demonstrations against the war across Australia last weekend. It’s never been clearer that it will take an international grassroots movement to win justice for the Palestinians. Each and every act of protest and resistance is important; each one of us can and must play our part.

Omar Hassan

Israel’s renewed Gaza slaughter

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.

Trump’s tariffs an attack on the working class

The logic of Trump’s reactionary agenda

Don’t trust the Democrats, we need real resistance to Trump

Imperialist competition drives military build-up

Trump’s foreign policy: the method behind the madness

Trump 2.0 is reviving America’s worst traditions. How far can it go?

Erdoğan’s attack on democratic rights sparks mass protests in Türkiye

Trade war spurs nationalism in Canada

Israel’s renewed Gaza slaughter

Resist the new militarism

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