The United States presidential election circus has moved to the White House, where the volatile Donald Trump has become the face of the U.S. ruling class. While Trump tweets his “alternative facts” (also known as “lies”), he is inheriting a weakening U.S. empire under threat from inter-imperialist rivals Russia and China. The growing instability of the worldwide capitalist order points the way to the next world war.
Trump is assuming the presidency as U.S. bosses’ world dominance faces its greatest challenge since World War II. The old global order—where a far superior U.S. military held sway over the Atlantic and Pacific, dominated the Middle East and Latin America, and controlled every oil route—is under attack from all sides.
U.S. losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of internal divisions within the U.S. ruling class, have emboldened Russian and Chinese bosses to expand their spheres of influence. Seeing a power vacuum, smaller capitalists are seizing any opportunity to assert their autonomy. As the U.S. bosses scramble to put their own house in order, fend off their challengers, and hold on to their faltering empire, they are stuck for now with the undisciplined, unreliable Trump.
The rulers hope to keep the new president in line by surrounding him with loyalists to finance capital, the dominant wing of U.S. Imperialism: ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state; Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, a pair of retired generals who know how to take orders; a slew of Goldman-Sachs bankers; and disciplined capitalist servants like Vice President Mike Pence and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the Alabama arch-racist nominated for attorney general. But if events of last week are any indication, with Trump flailing out at whim, the president’s handlers have a lot of work to do.
As they grow relatively weaker, U.S. bosses will lash out even more lethally. Only an international working class, organized for revolution by Progressive Labor Party, can end this murderous system. More than 500,000 have died in Syria since the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton team instigated and financed that country’s civil war. Trump is a horror show, but he follows in the footsteps of the racist, imperialist, criminal misleaders who preceded him. All bosses, liberals and right-wingers alike, are the sworn enemies of our class.
While the path forward will not be an easy one, there is a way out of this capitalist quagmire. It is up to us to have the courage and confidence in the working class to create and run a new world. To get there will demand patient yet urgent collective struggle against the bosses’ oppression and ideology. The path to freeing ourselves starts by building a mass Progressive Labor Party and a communist movement for workers’ power.
U.S.-Russia Battle Widens
For the last 70 years, the big U.S. oil bosses and Wall Street capitalists have profited from their position as top-dog imperialists. But Russian capitalists are threatening the old order in both the Middle East and Europe.
Trump’s flirtation with President Vladimir Putin is secondary to the divisions in the FBI and CIA over how the U.S. ruling class should deal with Russia. Lacking working-class commitment to fight and die for the U.S. empire, the bosses know they cannot confront the Chinese and Russian bosses at the same time. In one of his last acts as president, Obama signaled the main wing’s top priority by sending 4,000 combat troops, tanks, trucks, and heavy artillery into Russia’s backyard in Poland, Romania, and the three Baltic states: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania (CNN 1/14). Additionally, more than 300 Marines were deployed to Norway, which borders Russia for more than 120 miles on the Scandinavian Peninsula—the first foreign military posting in Norway since World War II (New York Times, 1/16). To this point, neither Tillerson nor Mattis have objected to the previous administration’s provocative display of power.
The U.S. bosses are straining to hold together NATO, the historic Cold War military alliance, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and destabilization of Ukraine. Russia has undermined NATO by cutting a gas pipeline deal with Turkey, the second largest NATO military power, and by subsidizing nationalist movements to break away from the European Union. Meanwhile, Putin has outflanked the U.S. rulers by forming a coalition with Turkey, Iran, and the Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime: “Russia signed a long-term agreement on Friday to greatly enlarge its military presence in Syria, more than doubling the space for warships in Russia’s only Mediterranean port and securing rights to an air base that may already be adding a second runway” (New York Times, 1/20).
China Moves in on U.S. Turf
Sensing the U.S. bosses’ reluctance to take them on, at least in the short term, Chinese rulers are expanding their own empire across the globe. The recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, featured Chinese President Xi Jinping calling for a new world order, with China playing the leading role. In introducing Ji, the Forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, showed which way the winds are blowing: “In a world marked by great uncertainty and volatility, the world is looking to China”( Al Jazeera, 1/17).
Under Xi’s proposed new alignment, China would guarantee that imperialist trade kept flowing: “It is Xi’s China that is promising to expand the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative to link Asia to Europe and Africa using land, air, and sea” (Newsweek, 1/18). According to this vision, China would dominate the Pacific Rim, weakening U.S. influence there. Countries previously subordinate to the U.S., including the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand, are being both enticed and threatened to join this new China-led club.
While the U.S. bosses are keeping their powder dry for now, they will not surrender their imperialist spoils without a fight. At some point, Chinese expansion beyond Asia will trigger a response. The U.S. will strike back with all the power the rulers can muster. Workers in the U.S. and China will be caught in the middle.
Bosses Desperate to Build Pro-War Movement
Despite Trump’s promises to put “America First” (a phrase invoked by isolationists and anti-Jewish racists in the 1940s), U.S. foreign policy can be counted on to pursue the interests of U.S. capitalism at the expense of the international working class. U.S. businesses amassed vast fortunes in rebuilding Europe after World War II. According to the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. has attempted to influence 81 elections around the world since 1946—not including military coups or regime change efforts after the elections (12/21/16). As the world’s balance of power shifts, and old postwar alliances weaken, defense of “America First” will inevitably mean more and broader war.
In the November election, the biggest U.S. capitalists, including Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, and JPMorgan Chase, lined up behind Hillary Clinton. These main-wing bosses are now heavily represented in Trump’s cabinet. To hold onto their empire, they will not blink at killing millions of workers around the world. If Trump fails to deliver the pro-war movement they need, some other politician will take his place. Only communist revolution, led by PLP, can smash this carousel of exploitation and mass murder for all time.