Dave Stockton
Donald Trump’s first hundred days in office have put the tech broligarch motto ‘move fast and break things’ into action. A blitz of reactionary policies has dislodged longstanding pillars of the domestic and international US-based order.
At home, decades of the antiracist, environmental and anti-gender discrimination legislation, along with the democratic rights of American citizens, are under unprecedented attack from his dozens of executive orders. His billionaire henchman Elon Musk is tasked with the mass sacking of federal employees and huge spending cuts.
The assault doesn’t stop at the US border, with Trump’s campaign to deport millions of ‘illegal’ migrants, to tear up the environmental pledges agreed at the COP conferences, to end USAid, to threaten tariff wars with Canada and Mexico and to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal. The world was shocked by his demand to take ownership of Gaza and evict its two million people, breaking with three decades of the phony ‘two state solution’.
Dumping Zelensky for Putin
Then Trump upstaged himself with his reversal of US support for NATO allies over the war in Ukraine which he promises to end… on the terms of the aggressor, imperialist Russia. Trump hasn’t just abandoned Biden’s policy of a carefully graduated supply of arms and funding for Ukraine’s self-defence to keep the war going, he has endorsed most of Putin’s justifications for his invasion. He even declared Zelensky a dictator and demanded Ukraine repays three years of aid by handing over $500bn worth of his country’s rare earth minerals.
These threats are aimed not just at Kyiv but at the UK and the European Union. Trump scarcely hides his contempt for the potentially rival bloc, which he labels an anti-American institution that has shaken down the US for decades in terms of trade and defence spending. The EU now has two enemies, in Moscow and Washington, with the latter by far the most threatening.
This turn in US policy, from unreliable and controlling ally to dangerous gangster, broke cover on 12 February with what Trump called a ‘lengthy and highly productive’ phone call with Vladimir Putin, a man he has long admired for his ‘strength’, i.e. brutality. In a report of the conversation, posted on the Truth Social media platform, Trump said,
‘We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations. We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now,’
When Zelensky objected to being sidelined from the negotiations in Saudi Arabia and any deal over Ukraine’s head, Trump replied by reversing reality, a well-worn right wing tactic: ‘Today, I heard, “Oh, well, we weren’t invited.” Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it’ and furthermore, ‘you should have never started it’.
He went on to assert ‘Zelensky has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and millions have unnecessarily died’, adding he ‘better move fast or he is not going to have a country left’. To add insult to injury he claimed, ‘Russia wants to do something, they want to stop the savage barbarism.’ Trump is angling toward bringing Russia out of the diplomatic cold, ending sanctions and adding it to the G7, from which he says it should never have been excluded.
Meanwhile at the Munich Security Conference on 14-16 February, US vice-president JD Vance made it clear that Washington would intervene in European politics to ensure that forces akin to Trumpism could gain the upper hand in Europe. Elon Musk had already blazed this trail, appearing online at an election rally of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to urge them to shed any guilt complex about Germany’s past, and attacking Keir Starmer for ‘persecuting’ fascist rabble rouser Tommy Robinson.
Vance declared there was a ‘new sheriff in town’ and the danger to Europe came not from Russia but ‘from within’ by social democratic and liberal leaders ignoring or suppressing their voters’ justified fears of mass migration. He demanded that Germany should tear down its ‘firewall’ against the racist populist right’s participation in government, plainly alluding to the AfD, though not naming it. Vance also snubbed SPD’s Olaf Scholz, then still Germany’s Chancellor, and met the far-right party’s leader Alice Weidel on the sidelines.
The alarmed European leaders, including Starmer, met on Emmanuel Macron’s invitation in an emergency summit to discuss Trump’s bi-lateral negotiations with Putin. But they failed to produce a united stance. Talk of creating a European defence system always meets with major obstacles: the lack of independence not only of Britain and France’s nuclear deterrent but also of the command and coordination systems of the European armed services. Without the US such a system would take years to create and trillions to pay for.
Trump has only ripped off the covers from the fact that Nato is a protection racket, defending the interests of the major European imperialist states, but at the price of tying it to the geostrategic goals of the US giant. The fact that Macron, Merz and even Starmer are impotent means that they will be unable to halt any deal Trump strikes with Putin.
A reactionary peace
These developments certainly put semicolonial Ukraine in a dire situation. If the US pulls the plug on all its military assistance – financial, logistical, intelligence – it is unlikely the impoverished country can fight on successfully against its much larger imperialist invader without suffering further serious losses of territory and soldiers, and greater destruction of its cities and their civilian populations.
European Nato members and the EU would not be able to plug the gaps left by a complete US withdrawal, contra the pathetic claims of Starmer to ‘turn the screws’ on Putin with sanctions and Ukraine aid. If Zelensky signs on to Putin and Trump’s deal, it will indeed be seen as similar to Munich 1938. However, even this analogy misses the mark: for Trump and most of the US bourgeoisie, looking to America’s world position, it is China not Russia that is the strategic threat.
If Trump and Putin succeed in clinching a deal and don’t fall out over the spoils, Ukrainians may well be forced to accept an armistice. But Ukrainian workers and socialists should make it clear to the world that their country is being ripped apart by two gangs of armed imperialist robbers and by the sections of the Ukrainian capitalists who act as their agents. The EU states have already seized large parts of the country’s agriculture; the US want to seize its mineral wealth; and Russia occupies one-fifth of its territory.
Socialists worldwide should denounce a reactionary imperialist peace based on annexations and continue to demand the complete withdrawal of all Russian forces from Ukraine. We must recognise Ukraine’s right to continue to defend itself against Putin who still refuses to recognise the former Soviet republic and Tsarist colony as a sovereign and independent nation, making the chauvinist claim that the Ukrainian nation does not exist.
It should be for the Ukrainian people alone to decide if they want or are able to continue to wage their justified defensive war. If they do so, they have a right to take arms and other supplies from wherever they can get them. But Ukrainian workers should beware of the US and the EU reasons for doing so and organise a political struggle to expose and resist their plans to shackle their economy for decades to come.
On the left in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the Communist Party of Britain, the Stop the War Coalition and Counterfire have long demanded Ukraine make a ‘negotiated peace’ with its imperialist occupier. The Morning Star now writes ‘peace talks are overdue and welcome’ and ‘nobody on the left should seek to prolong the fighting’. Trump’s imposed peace has fully exposed the reactionary reality obscured by such demands.
Despite criticising Trump and Putin, the British Stalinists and their fellow travellers on the question miss the mark. An imperialist-brokered peace deal always meant carving up Ukraine. It will not stop Putin’s plans to rebuild the Russian Empire nor stop inevitable future wars—Trump wants to settle with Russia to hike tensions globally with China. The European working class must oppose Trump’s demand for increased arms spending as well as calls for an independent European military, while opposing NATO rhetoric and indeed its existence.
America, Britain and the EU are of course on a global scale no better than Russia. But the tendency of the ‘campists’, nostalgic for the Stalinist USSR, to gloss over the fate awaiting Ukrainians in the four oblasts that Russia has laid claim to is astounding. Whatever territory Putin retains will only be rebuilt, if at all, as a highly militarised zone, where textbooks are rewritten to obliterate Ukraine as a nation and the Ukrainian language is extinguished completely. The struggle for democratic and workers’ rights will be paramount in eastern and western Ukraine.
If there is an armistice or a peace deal, we should oppose attempts by the EU states to force the return of Ukrainian refugees. The Ukrainian workers, small farmers and poor should reject the economic policies subordinating to their land and labour to the EU and US economically, and demand both imperialist camps, the US-EU as well as Russia pay for this reconstruction and the clearing of unexploded ordinance and mines, so that the inhabitants can voluntarily return. The seceded eastern provinces and the Crimea must have their independence respected and the right to decide democratically which state to belong to or independence.
In Russia the task is to organise against Putin’s FSB police tyranny, as the end of the war reveals the immense scale of the suffering, death and economic wastage, calling to account the criminals in the Kremlin and the capitalist oligarchs who supported it. For as long as Putin continues to rule, especially as long as he can pose as the winner, then in the states surrounding the Black Sea, in Caucasus and central Asia he will provoke new wars to ‘Make Russia Great Again’.
But an armed Europe under its oldest colonialist and imperialist powers, Britain, France and Germany, forced to spending billions on rearmament, whilst slashing their welfare states to ribbons, will also lay the powder charges for the detonation of a European war if there is not a European revolution to stop it.
Indeed, only the European working class—providing it unites its forces across the continent and indeed with those of all the continents—can prevent further conflict and head off the horrific prospect of a Third Imperialist World War by a revolutionary struggle for power against their ruling classes.