Is Trump working for peace or for a different war strategy?  The new Republican administration has initiated talks with Russia to normalize relations and end the Ukraine war.  Trump spoke of seeking a 50% reduction in nuclear forces and called for cuts in the military budget.  The viciously anti-communist National Endowment for Democracy could be reduced or eliminated.  Should the peace movement be supporting these initiatives even as we recognize the continued genocide of the Palestinians and attempt to destroy socialist Cuba?

What is the track record?  The first Trump administration gave us the tariff war against China, put Cuba on the official State Department Sponsors of State Terrorism list, abrogated the nuclear program agreement with Iran, and disrupted and withdrew from international cooperation on climate change and the global pandemic.  This is just the beginning of the list of actions of a war hawk, not a peacemaker.

Today’s world is changing.  The 2024 GDP figures confirm what Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi referred to as the  “trend of the times,”  the rise of the Global South.  This is based on the shift of the expansion and dynamism of the production forces out of the West.   All of the most rapidly growing economies are in the Global South and China.  All of the G7 economies grew slower than the world average.  China has replaced the United States as the world’s biggest trading nation.  More rapid economic growth in the developing world lays a basis for multilateralism.

From the point of view of the imperialist, implementing a policy of hegemony in a world irrevocably moving towards multilateralism is no easy task.  There have been different strategies; for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others argued that Eurasia was key to controlling the world, and a strategy of hegemony must focus on dominating  this super-continent.  That seemed to work in the 1980s-90s with the collapse of the Soviet and US détente with China.

But in the past period, the Biden policy of defeating Russia was a failure.  Russia moved east, got around US sanctions and now Russia, China and central Asia are bound more  closely together.  The US position on the Eurasian mainland has largely collapsed, with even longtime ally Europe now examining an independent path.  Only the Middle East remains under US domination with Israeli military aggression against Palestine, Iran and allies.

The ruling class is shifting US war making strategy to consolidating the base at home with a fascistic power grab.

The ruling class is shifting US war making strategy to consolidating the base at home with a fascistic power grab.  By extension, Trump wants to annex Greenland, control the Panama Canal and incorporate Canada to build fortress America.  This is the New Monroe Doctrine.  A section of the ruling class regards this approach better matched to the reality of the (in their view, temporary) decline of US hegemony and therefore more effective than the policies of the semi-blundering Biden.  The neoliberal globalists over-extended US power and sustained defeats.

The Trump peace rhetoric will become more believable if the US actually does take the initiative to significantly reduce its military spending and nuclear weapons program.  This goal has been stated by previous US presidents but never materialized.  Blustering rhetoric or a cosmetic con job will not count.  The military-industrial complex likes war for greater profits and is too powerful.

Therefore we should regard anything positive for peace as good while at the same time criticizing the imperialist Trump policies in Palestine, Cuba, China and elsewhere.  The libertarian and right-wing peace patriots, as well as liberals are wrong to drop criticism of US imperialism.  The central long-term strategic goal of US foreign policy is to contain and stop China, and instigate counter-revolutionary regime change, as described in the 2018 document of the National Security Agency.  This has not changed.  A developed modern socialist China as Beijing is planning and implementing for 2050 is a capitalist-imperialist nightmare.  The capitalists hate socialism and don’t even like capitalist countries with an independent foreign policy.

In Ukraine negotiations, there should be no illusion that US imperialism is extracting itself from a losing situation so it can regroup to strike elsewhere.  The Trump sector of the ruling class hopes that pulling Russia closer to the West will again make its resources and markets available and most importantly help contain China.  We should continue to expose and oppose the Trump imperialist foreign policy.

Image: Creative Commons 2.0

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