US President Donald Trump has thrown Ukraine to the wolves. After carrying out a brutal invasion for three years, during which a million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now being rewarded with a large slice of the country’s territory, while Trump is demanding a substantial stake of its resource wealth for the US.
This is imperial plunder at its finest: powerful countries ripping up a weaker one for their own benefit.
Commenting on the war in recent weeks, Trump has repeated his strange views on the world’s hierarchy of suffering. According to him, the main victim of the European slaughter is the US, because it has sent “hundreds of billions of dollars” in aid (like most of Trump’s comments, this is a gross exaggeration). The villain is Ukraine for continuing to resist Russian imperialism. And exhausted Russia, with its unfairly maligned dictator, deserves a break. 
This is Trump’s enduring view of international politics: poor little America has been ripped off by everyone. It is as unhinged as his ramblings about migrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio. 
The US spent the greater part of the last century invading other countries, overthrowing governments and exploiting half the globe through its multinational corporations. Now, Trump wants to amp it up by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, subsuming Canada and turning Gaza into a playground for US billionaires.
Putin, for his part, has sent the Russian military and mercenaries on bloody rampages through Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and West Africa, and shielded his fellow dictators from popular uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
It appears that everyone wants to play the victim now. The European powers and the United Kingdom say that Trump has abandoned them—that they have been left to fend for themselves in the noble task of protecting weaker countries. They say they must massively beef up their military spending to develop much bigger and much deadlier armed forces.
The European Commission has moved to allow €800 billion in additional borrowing by EU governments to “substantially increase” military spending. Germany’s incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to do “whatever it takes” to raise half a trillion euros for the military. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to cut the foreign aid budget to increase military spending. This is all on top of a 30 percent increase in EU member states’ spending on the military since 2021.
Their justification for military expansion is one of the more Orwellian pieces of capitalist propaganda: that more weapons equal more peace. In reality, they want only to defend and extend their own national interests in an increasingly unstable world.
The increased spending will come at an enormous cost to European and British workers, who have already endured waves of austerity over the last fifteen years. The money will have to come from somewhere, most likely health and social services that matter far less to the capitalists than lower taxes and subsidies for business. Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh put it plainly in an article titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”:
“The welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt. It was never designed for a world in which living to 100 is banal ... I have come to doubt whether rich, democratic societies can make difficult reforms—except in a crisis. Chronic discomfort isn’t enough. An element of real fear has to come in, as perhaps it has now.”
While workers get poorer, those at the top get richer from an expanding war machine. According to the US State Department, US weapons manufacturers and military contractors registered an unprecedented increase in sales last year. This made 2024 one of their most profitable years ever, thanks to the slaughters in Ukraine and Gaza and the military buildup around China. European weapons companies’ stocks have soared in the last week. 
There is much speculation about why Trump has sold out Ukraine. Some chalk it up to his erratic nature and admiration of dictators. While Trump does indeed seem to have an affinity for Putin (an authoritarianism to aspire to, perhaps), there’s an underlying imperialist logic to his actions—one that has nothing to do with peace. 
The biggest threat to US global supremacy is China, the world’s second-biggest economy, which has significantly modernised its military over the last decade and formed an alliance with Russia. The US has been trying to “pivot” its war machine to confront China for years; there’s just a disagreement among US elites over how exactly to do it. 
The Biden administration favoured strengthening multilateral international alliances, such as NATO, while building the military-industrial complex at home. 
Trump favours a more transactional approach—get the best deal with whatever country—which can mean extorting traditional allies. Some in the Trump administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, argue that the US should try to cleave Russia away from China, or at least weaken their alliance. In addition, Trump has grumbled for years that the US shoulders the economic burden of Western military alliances—he wants the Europeans to spend substantially more, rather than rely on a US security guarantee.
There has been much handwringing among global commentators about Trump’s approach, particularly about what it means for the “rules-based order”. In foreign policy speak, this refers to the post-World War Two set of rules administered through bodies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, which supposedly protect the sovereignty of individual countries, preserve peace and curb excessive uses of power. 
But one only has to look at the Vietnam War, successive invasions of the Middle East, Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and countless other atrocities to see that the “order” was an alliance of powerful countries, including the US, Europe, the UK, Japan, Australia and others, who used economic or military pressure to rig the world in their favour. 
The US’s allies and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media are upset that the rules are possibly being altered. But they’re all still playing the same dirty game: powerful countries ruling the world through shifting networks of alliances. 
The Trump administration also demands higher military spending from Australia, an increasingly important country for the US because of its location in Southeast Asia and willingness to host US military and spy bases. Eldridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for head of policy at the Defence Department, said last week that Australia needs to increase defence spending to 3 percent of GDP. Australia is already trekking in this direction, spending a record $56 billion, or 2 percent of GDP, this year. Treasury expects it to rise to 2.4 percent in 2027-28.
Many Australian commentators are beginning to urge the government to join the global military buildup. Take the Australian Financial Review’s Christopher Joye: 
“We have to be able to produce our own ballistic missiles with the ability to strike any place on the planet. We need independent nuclear power and the capacity to enrich weapons-grade uranium for strategic optionality. And we need scores of nuclear submarines ...”
The Labor government has steadfastly refused to criticise Trump in any way, even over Ukraine, for fear of pissing off the new president, in part fearing that the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal be put at risk. But that deal ought to immediately be scrapped. Writing at the Conversation last year, Australian National University visiting fellow Peter Martin noted:
“Australia’s decision to buy three nuclear-powered submarines and build another eight is so expensive that, for the $268 billion to $368 billion price tag, we could give a million dollars to every resident of Geelong, or Hobart, or Wollongong.”
The threat of a future global war seems so far away that many don’t take it seriously. The climate change and attacks on our living standards and the oppressed seem, and are, more immediate. But every new increase to a military budget, every new nuclear-powered submarine and every new speech about the threat of China takes us a step closer to that reality. 
The Ukrainian experience gives us a horrifying glimpse of what such a war might look like: the military tactics of old—protracted trench warfare in which millions of young soldiers are fed through the meat grinder—combined with cutting-edge technology such as kamikaze drones and AI-assisted cyber warfare. Not to mention that there are now enough nuclear weapons to obliterate all of humanity. Inside Russia, Putin has overseen an authoritarian crackdown to suppress any whiff of dissent to his invasion.
Workers and the oppressed worldwide have no interest in any of this—wars are the consequence of rivalries among the world’s ruling class spilling out into armed competition. Trump, Starmer, Merz and the rest are ramping up nationalist rhetoric to convince their populations to accept the economic burden of this remilitarisation drive. 
But you won’t ever see Elon Musk, Gina Rinehart, Donald Trump or Anthony Albanese on the battlefield—they make the rest of us fight on their behalf. Our world is run by monsters who will send millions to die if it means a bigger slice of the capitalist pie for themselves.
We have to build a socialist alternative to this never-ending nightmare of death and destruction. Unless we fight back, they will keep playing the same game of war and conquest, with us as their pawns.

Eleanor Morley

Resist the new militarism

Palestinian activist and recent graduate of New York’s Columbia University Mahmoud Khalil has spoken for the first time about his detention at the hands of the US government. Authorities arrested and are attempting to deport Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States and prominent figure in last year’s Columbia’s Gaza solidarity encampment. 
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took him on the evening of 8 March. They also threatened to arrest his pregnant wife, who is a US citizen. President Trump said Khalil’s case is “the first arrest of many to come”. The goal is to intimidate student activists, undermine the right to free speech and smash all solidarity with Palestine. 
“Even if Khalil is eventually able to prevail, the government may get the short-term win of sending the message to immigrants of every status that they risk arrest, detention and perhaps even removal for having the temerity to speak out in favour of unpopular causes, even if they might win their lawsuit in the end”, Stephen Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, told the New York Times.
Khalil is being held in a detention facility in Louisiana but was able to dictate <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25592020-letter-from-a-palestinian-political-prisoner-in-louisiana-march-18-2025/">the following statement</a> by phone to his friends and family. 
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Letter from a Palestinian political prisoner in Louisiana 
Dictated over the phone from ICE Detention 
March 18, 2025 
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law. 
Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing. 
Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities. 
On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours—I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request. 
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom. 
I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention—imprisonment without trial or charge—to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza Hospital director and paediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace. 
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the US has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted. 
While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns—based on racism and disinformation—to go unchecked. 
Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticising Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration's latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students—some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation—and the expulsion of SWC President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples. 
If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change—leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice. 
The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all. 
Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.

Letter from a Palestinian political prisoner in Louisiana

The defeat of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) led government in the recent German elections and the surge in support for the extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD) further highlight the bankruptcy of the mainstream reformist parties across the Western world. The SPD proved incapable of providing any positive alternative to the threat posed to workers and all the oppressed by the AfD. Indeed, the SPD’s policies facilitated the rise of the far right.
The “traffic light coalition” government of the SPD with the Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats presided over rising unemployment and falling working-class living standards, with sharp increases in rent and food prices. The capitalists continued, of course, to rake it in, the SPD refusing to increase taxes on the rich. Workers were made to pay the cost of massively increased military spending, much of which was used to arm Israel, with cuts to spending on education and housing.
To compound this appalling picture, the SPD capitulated to the AfD’s vile racist campaign against migrants. SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared in October 2023: “We have to deport more people and faster”.
Little wonder then that the SPD’s vote collapsed by more than a third, to just 16.4 percent—its worst result since the 1890s—while the increasingly fascist AfD doubled its support to 20.8 percent.
It is not just in Germany that the total unwillingness of social democratic and Labor parties to defend the living standards of their traditional working-class supporters from attacks by an increasingly aggressive capitalist class or to provide any alternative to the far right has led to electoral oblivion. 
In Greece, in what became known as Pasokification, the Pan Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) suffered a monumental collapse in its vote, from 43.9 percent in 2009 to a mere 4.7 percent in 2015, after it imposed harsh austerity measures to meet the demands of the European capitalist class.
In France, years of austerity and attacks on living standards under Socialist Party (SP) President François Hollande led to a wipeout, the SP down to a derisory 1.75 percent in the 2022 elections. 
In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party finished in first place in last September’s elections with 28.8 percent. The Social Democratic Party, which in the 1970s regularly polled 50 percent, recorded its lowest vote—21.1 percent—since before World War I.
In the Netherlands, Labour formed governments with conservative parties in the 1990s and embraced privatisation and welfare “reforms” that led to serious protests from the unions. Its vote fell to 5.7 percent in the 2021 elections. 
In Portugal, the Socialist Party, after nearly a decade in government, was swept from office in March 2024, its vote plunging 13 percent to 28 percent. In New Zealand, Labor lost the 2023 elections, its vote almost halving to just 26.9 percent.
In Norway, Labour had an absolute majority in parliament from 1945 to 1961 but polled just 26 percent at the last elections in 2021. The party has been increasingly neoliberal since the 1980s and, inspired by Tony Blair’s New Labour in Britain, carried out the most widespread privatisation in Norway’s history.
In Britain, Labour leader Keir Starmer managed to win office last year. But Labour’s vote rose only a measly 1.6 percent to 33.7 percent despite facing a decrepit and deeply unpopular Tory government in office for 14 years.
Because of its inability to offer any hope of a better future and its attacks on living standards, the tide rapidly turned against Starmer’s Labour. Support for the right-wing racist Reform party surged in opinion polls to between 24 and 28 percent, with Labour down to around 24 percent.
Here in Australia, despite the widespread unpopularity of the previous Morrison government, Labor just scraped into office in 2022 with 32.58 percent of the primary vote, less than it attracted in the previous election. It was Labor’s lowest vote since the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the party had fragmented. Now Albanese’s first term government is hanging on for dear life.
The overall pattern is one of reformist parties responding to the end of the postwar capitalist economic boom in the mid-1970s by a sharp shift to the right. Without exception, they embraced neoliberal policies of privatisation of core public services, substantial cuts to the welfare state, so-called deregulation of the labour market that led to increased unemployment and job insecurity, combined with attacks on workers’ rights to organise.
It led to a marked fraying of workers’ attachment to their traditional parties, reflected at an electoral level but even more sharply in terms of active working-class membership of these at one time mass parties.
It is worth looking in detail at Swedish Social Democracy, for decades held up as the shining example of successful reformism, with low levels of unemployment and a strong welfare state funded by high marginal tax rates. The Swedish model combined strong state intervention into the economy with close collaboration of party and trade union leaders with the employers’ federation.
Sweden was also seen as having a left-wing foreign policy, the country acting as a haven for political refugees and former Prime Minister Olof Palme speaking out strongly against the US war in Vietnam.
In 1967 Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, a sympathetic historian of social democracy, likened the reformist project to the successful social democratic effort to divest the Swedish king of all power except for formal grandeur: “Without dangerous and disruptive internal fights ... After a few decades they [the capitalists] will then remain, perhaps formally as kings, but in reality as naked symbols of a passed and inferior development state.” 
This utopian vision was never to be. The Swedish capitalist class did not have the slightest intention of surrendering their wealth and power. They asserted themselves forcefully in the 1980s to compel the Social Democrats to make a decisive turn to anti-worker free market policies.
Founded in 1889, the Social Democratic Party (SAP) is Sweden’s oldest and largest party. From the mid-1930s to the 1980s, the SAP won more than 40 percent of the vote, the Communists polling an additional 5 to 6 percent. From 1932 to 1976, the SAP was continuously in office and then, from 1982 to 2022, it was regularly part of coalition governments.
The Swedish welfare state model was underpinned by economic expansion and high profit rates for key Swedish capitalist firms. Unlike most of Europe, Sweden’s economy was not ravaged by World War II. Indeed, it did very nicely out of the slaughter, as, behind a facade of neutrality, it was a major supplier to Nazi Germany’s military machine. 
But by the late 1970s the boom was over. Business profitability had fallen substantially, and investment was low. The bosses went on the offensive.
In response, the SAP initiated a virtual socioeconomic counter-reformation in the early 1980s. Party and trade union leaders determined that wages would have to be held down and profits pumped up.
Social Democrat Finance Minister Kjell-Olof Feldt embraced the neoliberal approach sweeping the capitalist world. Marketisation, privatisation and deregulation became the new priorities.
Speculative capital was allowed to run rampant. A financial crisis in 1991 brought an end to full employment in Sweden, and taxpayers had to fork out 4 percent of GDP to bail out the banks.
Harsh austerity measures that promoted inequality and profiteering were pushed through in the 1990s by both SAP-led and right wing-led coalition governments. Taxes on inheritance, wealth and residential property were cut to zero, social security scaled back and the health system run down.
By the 2000s, Sweden had become a tax haven for the wealthy. Forbes business magazine declared: “Sweden Heads the Best Countries for Business for 2017”.
Economic inequality soared, wealth distribution becoming the most uneven in Western Europe. In 2002, Sweden’s top 1 percent owned 18 percent of all household wealth; by 2017 they owned 42 percent. 
The Swedish “socialist” model had never been as good as it was cracked up to be. It involved a high level of class collaboration with the top bosses by SAP officials and the union bureaucrats, who headed a highly unionised workforce. The centralised system of wage bargaining that the Swedish Trade Union Confederation relied on incorporated promoting business efficiency and productivity as one of its key aims.
The SAP was never a genuine socialist party fighting for the class interests of workers. It had long appealed to Swedish nationalism to incorporate liberals, sections of the middle class and small farmers. As early as 1917 it joined a coalition government with Liberals and did so again in 1936 and 1940.
During World War II Sweden’s “neutrality” involved the Social Democrats in cordial relations with Hitler’s regime. The foreign policy radicalism of the 1970s has long gone, and the Social Democrats strongly backed Sweden joining NATO in 2024.
By 2018 the SAP, along with the four main bourgeois parties, viewed migrants as the main “problem” facing the country, competing with each other to be the one best placed to implement racist measures. This laid the basis for the rise of the Sweden Democrats, which had Nazi roots and gained 17.5 percent of the vote in the September 2018 elections. The SAP’s share of the working-class voted plunged.
At the most recent elections in 2022, the Social Democrats polled just 30.3 percent. The coalition they led lost to a right-wing government propped up by the racist far-right Swedish Democrats that polled 20.5 percent.
The global picture is very clear: the traditional reformist parties are utterly bankrupt. They are incapable of standing up to the threat posed by the far right.
They offer nothing when it comes to defending, let alone improving, working-class living standards and democratic rights. But they have been very successful in propping up the profits of big business and transferring wealth into the hands of the billionaire class.
Reformism is not about to disappear as a political force. The traditional parties still have a base amongst the trade union bureaucracy, and they can gain a vote as a lesser evil to the likes of Dutton and Co., especially if no fighting socialist alternative has been built.
At times the old parties can revive with a left face like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain or new reformist parties can be thrown up, like Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain or Die Linke in Germany. But neither Corbyn nor Syriza nor Podemos nor Die Linke has been able to stand up to the pressure of the capitalist class.
The approach of even the most left wing of the reformists, of working for change within the framework of the capitalist system rather than challenging the system outright, is a dead end. The Western ruling classes have shown over the last 40 years that they are fully determined to roll back the gains of a previous era. They are not about to surrender meekly.
The only road forward is a concerted working-class mobilisation to take on the bosses and the far right. The reformist parties are not going to lead that fight. That makes building a socialist party, which is genuinely up for a fight, a vital task for anyone who wants to see a better world.

Mick Armstrong

Social democracy in a state of collapse

Jim Martin

Obesity is a product of capitalism

US authorities have arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent figure in last year’s Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment. 
Khalil was reportedly inside his university-owned apartment in Manhattan when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took him on Saturday night. They also threatened to arrest his pregnant wife, according to Khalil’s lawyer Amy Greer.
Khalil is a permanent resident of the United States; his wife is a citizen. Greer told the Associated Press that the ICE agents told her they acted on State Department orders. She also said that Mahmoud’s whereabouts are unknown.
“Given that neither Khalil’s lawyer nor his eight-months-pregnant wife knows where in the United States he is currently being held, ‘detained’ seems like a euphemism. Kidnapped seems more appropriate”, City University of New York professor Corey Robin commented. 
This is the first publicly known deportation effort under President Trump’s promised crackdown on student activists.
The Republican Party’s 2024 election platform promised to “keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America” and to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again”.
Then, in a 30 January executive order, Trump warned: “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before”.
Shortly after the executive order was issued, the Justice Department assembled a multi-agency “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”. Its first priority, <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-formation-task-force-combat-anti-semitism">according to a media release</a>, “will be to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses”.
The targeting of Mahmoud Khalil has nothing to do with “fighting antisemitism”, which has become little more than a euphemism for waging a war on Palestinians and their supporters.
Deportation Defense in the United States released the following statement. We encourage readers of Red Flag to <a href="https://actionnetwork.org/letters/demand-the-immediate-release-of-columbia-student-pro-palestine-advocate-mahmoud-khalil-from-dhs-detention">sign the petition and share it widely</a>.
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Demand the Immediate Release of Palestinian Student Activist Mahmoud Khalil from DHS detention
On the evening of March 8, 2025, Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil was detained by the Department of Homeland Security. The arrest comes on the heels of the Department of State’s announcement that it plans to deport students affiliated with pro-Palestine protests. The student, who is Palestinian, is a lawful permanent resident of the U.S.
Columbia University, which recently published a <a href="https://publicsafety.columbia.edu/content/protocol-potential-visits-campus-us-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-ice-agents" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">new protocol</a> on its plans to cooperate with ICE, has targeted Khalil for his Palestinian identity and outspoken activism on multiple occasions over the last 17 months. 
He served as a lead negotiator during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring and has frequently appeared in media interviews and press conferences. Columbia’s continued acquiescence to federal agencies and outside partisan institutions has made this situation possible. 
Like many other Arab and Muslim students, Khalil has been the target of various Zionist harassment campaigns, fuelled by doxxing websites like Canary Mission. This racist targeting serves to instil fear in pro-Palestine activists as well as a warning to others. 
Add your name to demand the immediate release of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil from DHS detention and a reversal to Columbia University's protocol permitting ICE on campus without a warrant.

US government ‘kidnaps’ Palestinian student activist

Robert Narai

Trump and US imperialism—an interview with Joel Geier

The West Bank has been the primary region for the Israeli colonisation of Palestine for decades. There, Israeli settlers attack Palestinians and steal their land and homes under the protection of the Israeli military. 
In the mid-1990s, the Oslo Accords divided the territory into zones under Palestinian Authority control, joint Israel-Palestinian Authority administration, and total Israeli control. The last of these zones covers most of the land.
Israeli military violence in the West Bank escalated when the genocide in Gaza began. It has now increased further since the delicate Israel-Hamas ceasefire was signed in January. Far-right Israeli politicians, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have openly declared that they want to annex the entire West Bank.
Ghaied Hijaz is a student activist with the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University, which defends the right of Palestinians to education in the West Bank and Gaza. She spoke to Red Flag
about the current situation. The text has been edited for length and clarity.
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The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza must have been a great relief. But there are reports that Israel has since escalated its operations in the West Bank. What’s going on?
When the ceasefire was announced, it was of course the moment we’ve all been waiting for, especially for the people in Gaza. It gave this moment of relief and comfort.
But since the beginning of the ceasefire, everything in the West Bank got much worse.
Even though through the last fifteen months of war the West Bank was not technically living in war, we were witnessing daily raids, daily attacks on the villages and towns, daily arrests, daily killings. But when the ceasefire was announced, many troops that were in Gaza came to the West Bank, and they started by completely closing all the checkpoints, the entrances of all cities in the West Bank, and everybody was stuck. 
It was very, very sudden. At my university, we turned to online learning because there was no way anyone could reach the university if they were outside of Ramallah. People were stuck at the checkpoints for hours.
They continued closing everything for two weeks. And then, after two weeks, it started to get a bit easier, but now they’re going back at it again, they are pushing for more troops to go into the West Bank. 
Yesterday [23 February], they decided that they’re going to have tanks inside the cities, especially in Jenin. The last time Palestinians in the West Bank saw Israeli tanks in the middle of our cities and towns was during the Second Intifada in 2002-04. 
Now what we’re seeing is that the war is paused in Gaza because we’re still not sure if the ceasefire is permanent. And we’ve been hearing statements from Israeli officials claiming that they will go back to war very soon, and that they will not go on with the deal and so on. 
But the war in the West Bank is just starting. We’re just starting to see the plans that they have for the refugee camps, especially for the cities inside of the West Bank, to displace people, to change how cities look, to change the structure of cities and towns. 
They started in Tulkarm and Jenin. They are completely wiping out the refugee camps, they’re destroying all houses, they are building new streets, and they loudly say that they will not leave the cities for at least a year, and some say that they will never leave.
So Israeli forces are saying they’re going to be in Palestinian cities in the West Bank long term?
Because of the Oslo Accords the areas in the West Bank are separated into A, B and C areas, and the A area is for the Palestinian Authority, where the Israeli military is not supposed to enter. But of course, that was never a reality—the Israeli military would enter any city or town that is in the Palestinian area anytime they want.
But they were never inside the city or town for a long time. Now they’re saying that they are going to create bases inside the cities and the towns. They demolished most of the homes in the Tulkarm refugee camp and in Nur Shams refugee camp. Just like how they did the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza, they want to do this in the heart of towns and cities and refugee camps, and they don’t want to leave.
They say that this will be the new reality. No A areas, no Palestinian Authority. They’re going to rule everything, which they already did, but this is in a different way. This is more intense. It puts the West Bank in the middle of a war and creates new questions. What’s the future of the Palestinian Authority, if everything that the Palestinian Authority is based on is being torn apart?
Has there been more violence and land theft by Israeli settlers?
Yes. After the ceasefire was announced, with the plans for annexation, with what Trump is saying, with Netanyahu’s promises to Israeli officials on the right wing to increase attacks in the West Bank instead of Gaza, they’ve just got more nerve now. They keep blocking roads for everyone, attacking people in their farms. In the olive picking seasons, we’ve seen settlers go into lands burning trees [and] hurting people.
And they also organise attacks on a city or a town, and they shoot and kill people because they are all armed. And most of the time, that would be with the protection of the IDF [the Israeli military]. So the IDF would be there just to protect settlers from people who are throwing stones at them as they are shooting with their machine guns at everyone.
In many areas, especially the C areas in the West Bank, you would have land. It’s in your name; it’s yours. The Israeli government hasn’t exactly taken it, but you’re not allowed to do anything in it. It’s yours, but you can’t go there, sometimes you need a permit to go there, you can’t remove anything, you can’t grow anything. You can’t even pick the fruits of the trees.
Since the right-wing politicians and officials in the Israeli government refused a ceasefire and didn’t want to halt the attack in Gaza, Netanyahu promised [Bezalel] Smotrich, who is the finance minister and is kind of the de facto ruler of the West Bank, to take the war from Gaza to the West Bank to achieve what they’re planning for annexation and displacement of Palestinians.
The ceasefire deal has included the release of hundreds of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. How has the community responded?
We have been waiting for our detainees and prisoners to be released for years, especially the ones who were sentenced to life sentences. And also many of the women, many of the children who were living under cruel circumstances in Israeli prisons, under torture, starvation and everything.
So it was a moment of happiness that was long waited for. On the first day of the ceasefire, many people gathered to welcome the released Palestinian women and children that day. And even though it was so cold we were waiting in the streets under the threat of Israeli forces attacking. And they did, throwing tear gas, live bullets or rubber bullets.
We needed to give our prisoners the welcome they have long been waiting for. And so even though it was delayed for six hours, there were a lot of people who were not going to let Israeli forces ruin this moment for us. And every week after that, when there’s a release as part of the exchange deal, hundreds gather to welcome their loved ones.
But as we’re seeing people getting out, we’re hearing more horrible stories about the situation they were living in. When they get out of the bus and we see them, sometimes we don’t even recognise them. Like, if you saw Khalida Jarrar—she was right next to me and I didn’t recognise her. She was in such bad shape and bad condition that it was tearing my heart apart. [Jarrar is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was released as part of the prisoner exchanges.]
Last Saturday [22 February], it was supposed to be the last day of prisoner exchange. Six hundred Palestinian prisoners were supposed to be released. More than half of them were women, children, and men who were detained in Gaza after 7 October [2023]. And Israel, after delaying and delaying again and again, at 2am the next day decided they are not going to release the Palestinian prisoners, and they still haven’t released them [as of 25 February].
Has your activism with the Right to Education campaign been able to continue?
There’s a whole discussion in universities whether we should be on campus or just go to online learning because of how bad the situation is, because they always live with the threat of the settler attacks, threat of arrests, killing at checkpoints, and it’s actually dangerous. But what we always say is that getting to the university and moving between cities is a form of defiance and resistance, because what they want is to separate cities, and for every community to live alone, separated, isolated. And we don’t want that to happen.
We want to keep connected, no matter the hardships. And we continued doing that, even though it was becoming more difficult and challenging by the day. But since the ceasefire agreement, it became impossible.
Students were separated again. The campuses are really important for students to gather and communicate, and to organise together, to have the spirit of community. When everyone at home can’t move, that just crushes it.
And so for the past fifteen months, we’ve been on and off. When we go home, we need to come back and rebuild things again, rebuild the spirit, rebuild the organising efforts. But as the Right to Education, we continued working, because our work with advocacy and building alliances is just more online.
Other student groups and campuses have taken really big hits. Most of their activists are currently in prison or just released from prison, traumatised and not able to work or maybe not able to come back to university. So we’re going through difficult times where we’re trying to maintain student activism overall, not just in the Right to Education, but in all universities with all student groups.
US President Donald Trump recently declared his intention to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip. How did people in the West Bank respond?
Palestinians have been living under the threats of displacement, and in the West Bank, annexation, for 75 years. It’s not new. So when Trump said it, it was not really a new thing since in his previous term, he suggested the “deal of the century”, which was not exactly the same, but was leading to the same thing: to liquidate the Palestinian cause and get Palestinians scattered around the world.
It is [now] much more difficult circumstances, in a much more tense environment. But what we know is we’re not leaving. The core of the Palestinian cause is that Palestinians don’t want to leave. Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza are either refugees or they are residents from these cities. If they are refugees, they don’t want to become refugees again. And if they are originally not refugees, they don’t want to become refugees at all.
So, leaving is not an option for us. And it doesn’t matter if Trump said it or not. People are defiant of what Trump is saying. And that is just the stance of everyone. Every single political group, no matter the differences between them, they all say clearly we don’t want to leave.
I personally think that Trump’s plan is not about displacement. And it’s not going to work, because there’s no way to do it unless he wants to take Palestinians to the US, because nobody is willing to take Palestinians in, as we’ve seen statements from around the world. I think that Trump’s plan is about pushing normalisation [with Israel] in an economic trade way, especially with Saudi Arabia.
And I think that’s what’s dangerous about the plan. He’s just proposing something big that would make everybody say no, especially Arab countries, who are not exactly allies, but still hold on some grounds in supporting Palestinians. So he proposes this big thing to achieve other things he wants.
So it seems that, yes, they rejected the displacement plan, but they accepted normalisation with Israel. They accepted increasing cooperation with Israel, which is the kind of peace Trump is looking at. Trump is a businessman who’s just looking at everything and everyone as a profit. So when he’s trying to manipulate the Middle East, he’s just trying to make more profit. 
Is there anything else you would want our readers to know about what’s happening in the West Bank?
I don’t think that what’s happening in the West Bank is getting much coverage or much attention. Right now, I think we have 40,000 people displaced from three refugee camps, and these displaced people went to surrounding cities and towns. And we hear Israelis, what they’re saying is that they’re going to attack them.
It’s not enough for them that they’ve destroyed the refugee camp, that they have destroyed the houses, that they displaced everyone. They want to go after every single refugee. And we see this as they are attacking UNRWA and suspending their services in Jerusalem. 
If we’re still under the threat of displacement and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and in Gaza, and the threat of going back to genocide as Israeli officials want to resume the fighting, the fight is not over. It’s just starting, even though the past fifteen months were mentally exhausting and physically exhausting, and it caused a lot of damage and losses for a lot of people in the West Bank and in Gaza and around the world. People lost their jobs. They were getting harassed by Israeli activists and [the] Israeli government and everything. 
But we still have to keep going, because it’s not over.

Danica Rachel

The view from the ground in the West Bank

The far right’s “war on woke” has been taken to a terrifying new level with Donald Trump in the White House. He has made it clear that oppressed groups will be trampled until they shut up and put up. Trans kids have no right to be addressed as themselves. Young Black men have no right to resist being murdered by cops. Women have no right to reproductive control. Immigrants are invaders. (But far-right criminals like Andrew Tate should be <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/27/europe/andrew-tate-romania-us-intl-hnk/index.html">brought back into</a> the country.) 
This isn’t just a push-back against cultural symbols; it is about winding back the clock more than half a century on the rights and expectations of the working class and all of its constituent oppressed groups. The left should oppose all of Trump’s “anti-woke” measures, individually and as a package. 
The move that has grabbed the most attention has been Trump’s orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and practices. Basically, DEI has been outlawed for government bureaucracies and institutions. Trump has even rescinded a 1965 executive order mandating non-discriminatory hiring practices for government employees and contractors. 
On the chopping block is everything from the high-profile cosmetic DEI government initiatives of recent years (for example, the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/21/politics/cia-dismisses-intelligence-officers-diversity/index.html">CIA has dismissed its DEI officers</a>) through to <a href="https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/education/education-department-schools-cut-dei-lose-funding/">cutting vital education programs</a> for disadvantaged kids. In fact, Trump has threatened to shut the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-department-education-budget-employees-why-trump-wants-it-shut-down-2025-02-19/">whole federal education department</a> because it disproportionately assists kids in poverty or with special needs. This offensive against DEI dovetails with the DOGE campaign to trash the public service. 
Trump has also made it clear that the private sector is expected to follow suit in abandoning DEI and woke policies. The response has been more than obliging. Since the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action late in 2023, the anti-woke current has gained ground. But now there is a stampede away from DEI within corporate America. 
Walmart is ending diversity hiring commitments, shutting down its Center for Racial Equity and removing many LGBT-themed products from its website. Goldman Sachs is dropping its policy of having two “diverse members” on its board. Amazon is shutting down its “outdated programs and materials”. Google is ending diversity hiring and its observations of cultural events like Pride Month and Black History Month. Deloitte told its employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures. 
Meta is ending diversity hiring and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to bring more “masculine energy” into the company. Disney is getting rid of its Reimagine Tomorrow website, which highlights diverse employees. Talk about a bleak new order: no tomorrow for the kids. 
It’s an embarrassing turnaround, especially given the fanfare with which DEI was taken up by corporate elites just a few years ago. The craze began in response to the Black Lives Matter rebellion of 2020—the biggest demonstrations in US history. Corporations, government bureaucracies and NGOs rushed to capitalise on and contain the movement by rebranding themselves as “inclusive” and “culturally sensitive”. 
Some of the things they did were positive—like introducing or expanding non-discriminatory hiring processes. But mostly, it was about making token and well-publicised gestures, especially those that appeared to “diversify” management positions. There was also a rush to implement “implicit bias” training programs, often run by grifters such as Robin D’Angelo, who has amassed significant personal wealth by lecturing company employees about their inherent “privilege”.
It was no accident that US capitalists shelled out millions of dollars to corporate consultants like D’Angelo while opposing minimum wage rises and resisting workers’ attempts to form trade unions. 
Given the superficiality of DEI, it is no wonder that many corporate lackeys have quickly abandoned it in favour of the now trending far-right bigotry and an all-out assault on the oppressed. 
In general, the “woke era” offered only superficial reforms, at the same time as creating a sensibility that oppression is the result of cultural backwardness rather than structural and economic inequalities. It has been an era in which social solidarity and challenging the system have been jettisoned in favour of “calling out” bad ideas and the people holding them and adopting the supposedly “correct” and “inclusive” language, symbols and etiquette. 
Of course, it is perfectly legitimate to call people by their correct pronouns, rename or remove colonial monuments and so on. But we should not, especially now, go along with the liberal narrative that DEI and “woke” represented an important extension of the gains made by the civil rights movement and the liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. 
For the left, and those looking to dismantle systems of oppression, the “woke era” actually reflected a period of setbacks. It started with a turn away from the radicalism, collectivism and economic gains of the 1960s and 1970s, and towards the commodification and academisation of identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s. This happened alongside Reaganism (named after the Republican US president), which inflicted crushing defeats on working-class organisations and asserted the primacy of markets over all aspects of life. “Woke culture” represents the fusion of degenerated progressivism with the sensibilities of Wall Street financiers.
Nevertheless, while a left critique of modern identity politics and its effects is necessary, it should in no way prevent us from opposing Trump’s attacks and from recognising their much broader implications. Unfortunately, some on the reformist left have welcomed Trump’s offensive against “woke”. Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin magazine in the US, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/business/economy/trump-dei-democrats-left-unions.html">was quoted in the New York Times</a> as saying: “I am definitely happy this stuff is buried for now. What comes next might be worse ... [but] it has a chance to be better”.
This is deeply misguided. For one thing, Trump and his cronies have very different reasons for opposing “woke culture”. And in fact, the political right has, for now, won the conversation on “woke”, a term originally coined by anti-racist activists in the US but now turned into a pejorative term that encompasses every symbol of respect and dignity that oppressed groups have won, as well as our fundamental rights and protections. 
In their eyes, anyone who has even a passing concern about oppression is infected with “the woke mind virus”. And that is why Trump’s moves against DEI are far reaching and include attacks on laws and conventions established as a result of the civil rights movement. And his attacks on woke extend even further: to any individual institution or policy that defends the environment, to threats of deportation to people who dare to stand up to Israel’s attempted genocide in Palestine, to dismembering the National Labor Relations Board, opposing minimum wage increases, trashing the public service and firing thousands of workers. 
Also, the lines between cynical DEI measures and supportable measures are very blurry. The left should not call for diversity on corporate boards or support HR departments having more discretionary power. And the left should not support the punitive and censorial atmosphere that has become associated with social justice and identity politics. But more opposition to racism and other forms of oppression throughout society is a good thing—as is awareness of historical and contemporary injustices.
Rather than distinguishing between reasonable and reactionary “social justice” policies, we should recognise that the right-wing assault on “woke culture” is part of an assault on the working class in all its diversity. In fact, any criticism of wokeness that does not pose a superior way to advance the fight against oppression is a step in the wrong direction. This is especially the case when it is coming from a heinously reactionary administration that is inspiring fascists and the far right the world over. 
Trump is not clearing the path for the left to build a superior way of fighting against racism and other oppressions but throwing up more obstacles to the creation of a more caring and egalitarian society. Trump aims to create an atmosphere of fear. He wants to brutalise the most oppressed, and society more broadly, to lower all of our standards and expectations. He is about attacking the working class and any idea that workers should have rights. 
Sunkara’s comments are linked to a broader political view, termed “class first” socialism, which conflates neoliberal identity politics with all anti-racism and opposition to oppression, and which says that focusing on oppression is alienating to the working class, particularly at an electoral level. In practice, these people tend to support the Democrats. They blame the party’s adherence to identity politics when it fails and, while this is certainly a factor, their critique is aimed at rehabilitating the party. 
As well as a thin veneer for opportunist electoralism, these class reductionists sell out our side twice over: once by in effect arguing for the abandonment of the oppressed, and then again by arguing that the working class is too basic and self-interested to care about oppression. 
Yet, here we have such a clear example, in the negative, of how oppression and class are entwined. Trump wants to attack the oppressed, as a spearhead for a major assault on the working class—not one that is going to be phased in but one that is going on as we speak. In the name of the war on DEI and “woke”, vital services that workers rely on are being slashed, workers themselves are being fired, and basic standards that the workers’ movement has fought for are under threat. 
The political right has clearly benefited from defining its agenda as a “culture war” to make it seem separate from class attacks. The far-right politicians want to be able to masquerade as defenders of workers against culturally progressive elites. Liberal elites also like to peddle this idea, because it assists their class interests to present workers as culturally backwards but also to frame the struggles against oppression as classless pursuits of human progress. 
It is up to the left to reject these lies. The rights of racially oppressed groups, women and the LGBT community are inextricably bound with the class struggle. It was during high points of class struggle that oppressed groups won the most gains. Struggles against oppression have repeatedly been a lightning rod for broader working-class rebellion and advances. 
If we are going to defeat Trump’s assault, our side needs this history and political outlook. Fighting back will require mass resistance in the streets, industrial action by workers and the offering of an anti-capitalist horizon for our struggles. 
We have seen mass resistance in recent times: the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, the historic Palestine demonstrations in support of Gaza, some smaller but important mobilisations for trans rights recently. We need all these people and more to start organising, disrupting business as usual, asserting that the rights of the oppressed will be defended and expanded. 
And, crucially, we need to build links of solidarity between our struggles. Agonising about who has more privilege or whether people are harbouring implicit biases or manifesting micro-aggressions is a distraction from building these kinds of movements. 
Ultimately, to make real gains, we need the working class to move, to use its industrial power to fight for better wages and conditions and to fight like hell for the dignity and humanity that we all deserve. The workers’ movement, at its best, takes up the cause of every oppressed group because an injury to one is an injury to all. 
It is no accident that the far right and its billionaire champions want to degrade all of us: their power and wealth are based on trampling people. It is no accident that the liberal elites can be progressive only in tokenistic and superficial ways, because their power too is based on our oppression. 
In contrast to both, our power is based on solidarity and a collective drive for justice and dignity. It is this power—that of the working class and all of its constituent groups—that can one day establish a society that is genuinely diverse, equitable and inclusive.

Sarah Garnham

Trump’s ‘war on woke’ is a war on all the working class

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

Tom Bramble

Behind the chaos, Trump prepares to take on China

Over the last few weeks, Tesla has become the target for a growing, largely social-media-organised campaign across the United States. This past weekend alone, CNN <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/01/business/tesla-takedown-musk-doge/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>:
“Demonstrators gathered at more than 50 Tesla showrooms across the United States on Saturday in protest of CEO Elon Musk’s role in slashing government agencies as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency established by President Donald Trump.”
This was probably an undercount. If you follow the mainstream media alone, you’ll miss out on some protests. Our protests in <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/568634392836661" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chicago</a> have received no media coverage, and there has been scant coverage of protests in the suburbs. While many protests have been organised by <a href="https://indivisible.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Indivisible</a>, a nationwide campaigning group of liberal and progressive Democrats, the outpouring of protests at Tesla showrooms is much greater than one organisation.
Musk is despised by millions of people around the globe. The world’s richest man and best-known Nazi, Musk personifies everything that is wrong with the world today. <a href="https://www.teslatakedown.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tesla takedown</a> is a positive development in the struggle against the Trump regime and fascism in the United States. <a href="https://www.americanjewisharchives.org/snapshots/henry-ford-and-antisemitism-the-notorious-dearborn-independent/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Henry Ford</a> comes to mind as the last major auto industrialist who was identified closely with fascism. In many ways, Ford thrusted political antisemitism into the mainstream of US society through his newspaper the Dearborn Independent. But Ford was on the wrong side of the New Deal and preparations for WWII.
Today, <a href="https://prospect.org/power/2025-01-06-ford-musk-made-cars-backed-fascists/">according to Harold Meyerson</a>:
“Fast-forward now to Elon Musk, who today has no qualms about neo-Nazis ruling Germany. Quite unsolicited, Musk has tweeted (X-ed?) his way into Germany’s parliamentary election, which will be held next month, beginning by arguing that ‘only the AfD can save Germany’. 
“The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Alternative for Germany</a> is a far-right, vehemently anti-immigrant and racist party that has grown in strength, particularly in the economically depressed states that were formerly part of East Germany, since it was founded a dozen years ago. Musk has argued that it’s not a neo-Nazi party, but a number of self-professed neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers have been in the party’s leadership, while the German government views it as a potentially violent threat to German security.”
Yet, unlike Ford, Musk had attained political power that a few years ago would have been unimaginable. Musk is, however, vulnerable. His interventions in European politics have led to plummeting Tesla sales. Tesla’s stock has declined significantly. Major pension funds have dropped their ownership of Tesla stock, and prominent people have sold their cars. The various Tesla models have gone from being seen as saving the environment to being viewed as Nazi vehicles, like the <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/hitler-and-his-volkswagen-tracing-the-80-year-history-of-the-beetle/a-43942998" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Volkswagen</a> in the 1930s.
Like Henry Ford, Musk is a fanatical opponent of unions in his workplaces from California to Sweden to Berlin. We see Tesla workers as our allies. Ford was the last of the Big Three US automakers to be unionised by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 1941, following a bitter strike on the eve of US entry into the Second World War. Musk’s political power can ultimately only be curtailed if the workers in his car and battery plants are organised.
There is still much to do in the United States to combat Elon Musk, but more needs to be done internationally. Tesla takedown is a rare opportunity for anti-fascists, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0XLGvH8h7U" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">climate change activists</a>, and supporters of trade unions and democratic rights across the globe to come together with one target. We should make the most of this opportunity now. Organise or join protests at Tesla outlets in your country. Our international unity will make a difference.
Joe Allen is the author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service.
Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is co-author, with Jeanelle K. Hope, of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition, and, with Christopher Vials, of The US Antifascism Reader.

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