Since Donald Trump retook the presidency earlier this year, he’s said the goal of his administration is to resolve the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, use tariffs to improve U.S. bosses’ profits worldwide and upgrade the U.S. military in preparation for future conflicts. He claims this is the road to stabilize today’s tumultuous world “order” and bring peace and prosperity.
Under every Democratic and Republican administration, U.S. foreign policy is always disguised as a humane venture to protect the interests of all “Americans.” But in class-divided capitalist society, that’s impossible.
State power is wielded to protect the interests of the ruling propertied families, who are driven by the lash of competition to squeeze ever more from the labor of working people and attack our unions. The capitalist rulers then throw crumbs from their table to the meritocratic upper-middle-class layers who do their political bidding. Ultimately they rely on their massive war machine to enforce their interests.
What marks Trump’s foreign policy is not what he’s doing that’s different from previous administrations, but the accelerating challenges the U.S. rulers face today. They’re trying to buttress their weakening domination in a world where clashes with rival powers are growing sharper. This new reality was reinforced by Moscow’s bloody war seeking to conquer Ukraine and crush its people, and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom that killed over 1,200 Jews and others in Israel and the ensuing combat in the region.
All the major capitalist powers — Washington, Beijing, Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris and more — are driving to expand their militaries and reassessing relations with allies and foes alike.
They seek to redivide and plunder the world for resources, markets and capital, putting new wars — small and large — on the agenda. They bring closer the threat of World War III and of nuclear conflagration.
Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead sees no alternative to Trump’s foreign policy, arguing that former President Barack Obama “left the world system so dangerously and so unnecessarily exposed to the ambitions” of Beijing and Moscow.
In contrast, liberal commentators are aghast at the Trump administration. “Every day brings further evidence that a remarkably long-lived US-led international order is over,” Timothy Garton Ash writes in the Financial Times. “Trump is now tearing down what remains.”
But the causes of the explosive tensions shaking the world run much deeper than the policies pursued by either Obama or Trump, or by the government of any one country.
What the U.S. rulers put in place after their victory as top dog in the imperialist world following World War II was aimed at cementing their domination against both allies and rivals worldwide.
They pushed aside the British, French and other European rulers to become the chief force trying to suppress struggles for national liberation and rebellions by working people. They waged bloody wars in Korea and Vietnam and orchestrated the failed invasion against Cuba’s socialist revolution by counterrevolutionary forces in 1961. Washington launched political and military operations to defend its domination and seize the upper hand in every corner of the globe.
Despite the U.S. rulers’ supremacy, they were incapable of laying the basis for a period of sustained global economic expansion or to reverse the tendency of profit rates to decline. By the end of the 1980s, competition was sharpening between all the capitalist powers.
When the Stalinist apparatuses in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe collapsed, the U.S. rulers acted on the illusion that they’d won the Cold War and could impose their will uncontested. They launched long, bloody and unsuccessful wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere that further exacerbated the conflicts built into the weakening capitalist world “order.”
Growing threat of World War III
Today Washington faces a growing challenge from the Chinese rulers. Trump is trying to pull Putin’s regime in Russia into collaboration with Washington in hopes of laying the groundwork for an alliance against Beijing. This explains why the U.S. rulers are making efforts to find an end to Putin’s war in Ukraine on terms appealing to Moscow.
The U.S. administration is also trying to cut a deal with the reactionary rulers in Iran, to better focus on its conflicts with Beijing. The Iranian government is advancing efforts to process its uranium stockpiles to weapons grade and acquire nuclear weapons to be able to annihilate Israel. Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for the Jewish people is an entirely subordinate question for Washington as it pursues its goals.
The U.S. government’s drive to weaken Beijing lies behind Trump’s hefty tariffs against China. Despite cutting some of them May 12, the U.S. administration will continue to levy a tax of some 40% against Chinese exports. It seeks not only to push back Beijing’s rise, but to defend U.S. allies in the region, including the governments of Taiwan, Japan, Australia and the Philippines, and to draw them into the conflict against Beijing.
With the future of the tariff conflicts unclear, the editors of the Wall Street Journal wrote May 12 that it was time for “Congress to get serious about true military deterrence again.”
The rise of U.S. imperialism as a truly world power, as well as the contradictions facing the U.S. rulers, were outlined in 1928 by Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution, as part of his fight to defend V.I. Lenin’s revolutionary course against a deepening counterrevolution led by Joseph Stalin.
“It is precisely the international strength of the United States and her irresistible expansion arising from it, that compels her to include the powder magazines of the whole world into the foundations of her structure,” Trotsky wrote. “This transforms North American capitalism into the basic counterrevolutionary force of the modern epoch, constantly more interested in the maintenance of ‘order’ in every corner of the terrestrial globe.”
Nearly a century later, this remains a key feature of world politics. It underscores why it is an absolute necessity for the working class here — and everywhere — to build parties capable of organizing the toilers in their tens of millions to take political power out of the hands of the imperialist rulers.