Trump 2.0: New steps into capitalist chaos

In recent articles written on the first days of Donald Trump’s second presidency of the United States, the ICC has already explained that the dangerous chaos and havoc he has unleashed on the world since he took up residence in the White House is not an individual aberration in an otherwise stable system, but the expression of the collapse of the capitalist system as a whole and of its strongest power. The unpredictable gangsterism of Trump’s administration reflects a social order in ruins. Moreover, the liberal democratic faction of the US bourgeoisie which is resisting the new presidency tooth and nail is just as much part of this collapse and in no sense a ‘lesser evil’ or alternative solution to the populist MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement that should be supported by the working class.

Whatever political form capitalism takes today, only war, crisis and pauperisation for the working class are on the agenda. The working class has to fight for its class interests against all sections of the ruling class. The resurgence of workers’ struggles to defend their wages and conditions as recently occurred at Boeing and the docks of the eastern seaboard of the US, along with the resurgence of combativity in Europe, are the only promise for the future.

In this article, we want to explain more why and how Trump was elected for a second term of office, why it is more extreme and dangerous than the first term, in order to show more clearly the suicidal fate of the bourgeois order that it characterises and the proletarian alternative to it.

Trump’s first administration, a summary

At the end of 2022, in the middle of Biden’s tenure in the White House, the ICC made this balance sheet of the first Trump presidency:

“The eruption of populism in the world's most powerful country, which was crowned by the triumph of Donald Trump in 2016, brought four years of contradictory and erratic decisions, denigration of international institutions and agreements, intensifying global chaos and leading to a weakening and discrediting of American power and further accelerating its historic decline.”

The Biden presidency which followed Trump’s first administration was not able to reverse this worsening situation:

“...no matter how much the Biden team proclaims it in their speeches, it's not a question of wishes, it's the characteristics of this final phase of capitalism that determine the tendencies it is obliged to follow, leading inexorably into the abyss if the proletariat cannot put an end to it through world communist revolution."[1]

The guiding principle of Trump’s first term and his election campaign - ‘America First’ - has continued into his second term. This guiding slogan means that America should only act in its own national interests to the detriment of others, both ‘allies’ and enemies, by using economic, political and military force. To the extent that it can make ‘deals’ - rather than treaties - with other countries (which can in any case be broken at any time according to the ‘philosophy’ behind this slogan) means the US making foreign governments ‘an offer they can’t refuse’ - according to the famous line from the gangster film The Godfather. As Marco Rubio, Trump’s appointment as US secretary of state, has apparently been telling foreign governments: the US is no longer going to be talking to them about global interests and global order, but only about its own interests. ‘Might is right’, however, is not a rallying cry for American leadership.

America First was the recognition by part of the US bourgeoisie that by 2016 the foreign policies it had been following up to then of being the world policeman in order to create a new world order after the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 had only led to a series of costly, unpopular and bloody failures.

The new policy reflected a final awareness that the Pax Americana [2] established after 1945 and which guaranteed the US world hegemony until the fall of the Berlin Wall, could not be re-established in any form. Worse, in Trump’s interpretation, the continuance of the Pax Americana - that is the reliance of its allies on the economic and military protection of the United States - meant that the US was now being ‘unfairly’ taken advantage of by these former members of its imperialist bloc.

Trump’s first term: the background

Operation Desert Storm, in 1990, was the massive use of military power by the US in the Persian Gulf aimed at countering the rise of world disorder in geo-politics after the dissolution of the USSR. It was particularly directed at the independent ambitions of its former major allies in Europe.

But only weeks after this horrific massacre, a new bloody conflict broke out in the former Yugoslavia. Germany, acting on its own, recognised the new republic of Slovenia. It was only with the bombing of Belgrade, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, that the US managed to assert its authority in the situation. Desert Storm had stimulated, not lessened the centrifugal tendencies of imperialism. Consequently, Islamic jihadism developed, Israel began to sabotage the Palestinian peace process painstakingly engineered by the US, and the genocide in Rwanda left a million corpses, where the complicit western powers acted for their different interests. The 1990s, despite US efforts, illustrated, not the formation of a new world order but the accentuation of each for himself in foreign policy, and thus the weakening of US leadership.

The US foreign policy of the ‘Neo-Conservatives’ led by George W Bush, who became president in 2000, led to even more catastrophic failures. After 2001 another massive military operation in the Middle East was launched with the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of the ‘war on terror’. But by 2011, when US withdrew from Iraq, none of the intended objectives had been achieved. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction - an invented pretext for the invasion - turned out not to exist. Democracy and peace were not established in Iraq in place of dictatorship. There was no retreat of terrorism: on the contrary Al Qaeda was given a massive stimulus that caused bloody outrages in Western Europe. In the US itself the military adventures, which had been costly both in money and blood, were unpopular. Above all the war on terror failed to bring the European and other imperialist powers into line behind the US. France and Germany, unlike in 1990, opted out of the US invasions.

However, the return to ‘multilateralism’ in place of the ‘unilateralism’ of the Neo-Cons, during the presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2016) was not successful either in restoring US world leadership. It was in this period that China’s imperialist ambitions exploded, as exemplified by their geostrategic development of the New Silk Road after 2013. France and Britain pursued their own imperialist adventures in Libya, while Russia and Iran took advantage of the US semi-withdrawal from Syrian operations. Russia occupied Crimea and began its aggression in the Donbass region of Ukraine in 2014.

After the failure of the monstrous carnage of the Neo-Cons came the diplomatic failure of Obama’s policy of ‘cooperation’.

How could the US difficulties to maintain its hegemony get worse? The answer came in the form of President Donald Trump.

The consequences of Trump’s first presidency

In his first presidency Trump’s America First policy began to destroy the United States’ reputation as a reliable ally and as a world leader with a dependable policy and moral compass. Moreover, it was during his administration that serious differences emerged within the American ruling class over Trump’s vandalising foreign policy. Crucial divergences appeared in the US bourgeoisie over which imperialist power was an ally and who was an enemy in the USA’s struggle to retain its world supremacy.

Trump reneged on the Trans-Pacific Pact, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Nuclear Treaty with Iran; the US became an outlier on economic and trade policy in the G7 and G20, thereby isolating itself from its main allies on these questions. At the same time the US refusal of direct engagement in the middle east fueled a free-for-all of regional imperialisms in that region: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel and Russia, Qatar, all tried separately to profit from the military vacuum and mayhem.

Trump’s diplomacy tended to exacerbate these tensions, such as his transfer of the US embassy in Israel to the controversial city of Jerusalem, upsetting his western allies and angering Arab leaders who still saw the US as an ‘honest broker’ in the region.

Nevertheless, in the recognition of China as the most likely contender to usurp US primacy, Trump’s administration accorded with the view of the rest of Washington. The ‘pivot’ to Asia already announced by Obama was to be increased, the global war on terror officially suspended, and a new era of ‘great power competition’ was ushered in according to the National Defence Strategy of February 2018. A vast decades-long programme to update the US nuclear arsenal and to ‘dominate space’ was announced.

However, on the need to reduce the military ambitions and capacities of Russia - and to weaken the potential of the latter to help China’s own global manoeuvres - there appeared a divergence between Trump’s ambiguous policy towards Moscow and that of the rival faction of the US bourgeoisie which had traditionally seen Russia as a historic enemy in regard to its threat to US hegemony in Western Europe.

At the same time, connected to the question of Russian policy, a different attitude toward the importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the former centrepiece alliance of the American bloc, emerged, particularly over the treaty’s obligation of all the members of NATO to come to the aid of any of the others who came under military attack (ie the US would protect them from Russian aggression). Trump put this crucial stipulation in doubt. The worrying implications this held for the abandonment of the allies of US in Western Europe was not lost in the chancelleries of London, Paris and Berlin.

These foreign policy differences were to emerge more clearly during the Biden administration which followed the first Trump presidency.

The Biden interregnum: 2020-2024

The replacement of Trump by Joe Biden in the White House supposedly heralded a return to normality in US policy in the sense that it was marked by the attempt to reforge old alliances and create treaties with other countries, to try and repair the damage caused by the reckless adventures of Trump. Biden declared: ‘America is back’. The announcement of a historic security pact between the US, UK and Australia in the Asia-Pacific in 2021, and the strengthening of the Quad Security Dialogue between the US, India, Japan and Australia, signalled, amongst other measures, the pursuit of creating a cordon sanitaire against the rise of Chinese imperialism in the Far East.

A global democratic crusade against ‘revisionist’ and ‘autocratic’ powers - Iran, Russia, North Korea and especially China - was invoked by the new administration.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 provided the means for Joe Biden to impose US military authority once more on the recalcitrant NATO powers in Europe, obliging them, particularly Germany, to augment defence budgets and provide support to Ukraine’s armed resistance. It has also helped to exhaust the military and economic power of Russia in a war of attrition, and display US world military superiority in terms of weaponry and logistics that it supplied to the Ukrainian military. Above all the US, by helping turn much of Ukraine into smoking ruins, has demonstrated to China the danger of seeing Russia as a potential ally and the perilous consequences of its own desire to annex territory such as Taiwan.

However, it was apparent to the world that the US bourgeoisie wasn’t entirely behind Biden’s policy towards Russia, as the Republican Party in Congress, still under the heel of Donald Trump, made clear its reluctance to provide the necessary billions of dollars of support to the Ukrainian war effort.

If the support given to Ukraine was a success for the reassertion of leadership by American imperialism, at least in the short term, its involvement in Israel’s war in Gaza after October 2023 tarnished this project. The US became caught between the necessity of supporting its main Israeli ally in the Middle East in the face of Iranian terrorist surrogates, and the reckless determination of Israeli to play its own game and renege on a peaceful solution to the Palestinian question, thereby accentuating the military chaos in the region.

The slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless Palestinians in Gaza, courtesy of US munitions and dollars, completely belied the self-image of US moral righteousness that Biden promoted over the defence of Ukraine.

While the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon have inflicted a serious blow on the Iranian regime, the avowed enemy of the US, this hasn’t lessened the instability of the region, not least in Syria itself. On the contrary, the US has had to continue to deploy a sizeable part of its navy to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, reinforce its contingents in Iraq and Syria, and contend with the dramatic opposition to US policy by Turkey and the Arab countries.

Above all the threat of further military convulsions in the Middle East means that the pivot to Asia, the main focus of the US, has been disrupted.

Trump’s second term: 2025-

We have described how the problems of navigating the imperialist chaos that developed after 1989 led to divisions within the American ruling class over the policy to be pursued, and charted the growth of the populist policy of America First against a more rational course that tried to preserve the alliances of the past. The re-election of Trump back to power even after the debacle of his first presidency is a sign that these internal divisions have not been mastered by the bourgeoisie and are now returning to seriously affect the ability of the US to pursue a coherent and consistent foreign policy, even to the extent of jeopardising its main concern to block or pre-empt the rise of China.

Added to the dangerous uncertainty of this boomerang effect of political chaos on imperialist policy is the fact that the USA’s margin of manoeuvre on the world imperialist stage has appreciably diminished since Trump’s first term, and his second term occurs while two major conflicts are raging in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

We won’t go into the deeper causes of the political disarray within the American bourgeoisie and its state that Trump’s first actions have dramatically demonstrated, this will be explained in a further article.

But in less than a month Trump has indicated that the tendency for his America First policy to unravel the pax Americana that was the basis for US world supremacy after 1945 is going to accelerate much more rapidly and profoundly than it did in his first term, not least because the new president is intent on overcoming the safeguards that at that time limited his field of action in Washington by appointing his henchmen, whether competent or not, to the heads of state departments.

The main concern of the US bourgeoisie after 1989 - to prevent the end of its world domination in the free-for-all of the post-bloc world - has been turned on its head: the ‘war of each against all’ has become, in effect, the ‘strategy’ of the new administration. A strategy that will be more difficult to reverse by a new more intelligent administration than it was even after Trump’s first term.

The aim to take back control of Panama; the proposal to ‘buy’ Greenland; the barbaric proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turn the latter into a Riviera; all these early pronouncements of the new president are as much directed against its former allies as its strategic enemies. In the case of the Gaza proposal, which would benefit its ally Israel in the removal of a two-state solution to Palestine, it would only inflame the opposition of other Arab powers plus Turkey and Iran. Britain, France and Germany have already declared against Trump’s proposal for Gaza.

But it’s the likelihood is that the US under Trump will force a peace deal on Ukraine that would probably cede 20% of its territory to Russia, to which the West European powers are already vehemently opposed, that will further break up the NATO alliance, previously the axis of US international domination. The new president is demanding that the stagnant European economies of NATO should more than double their expenditure on their military forces in order to defend themselves on their own, without the US.

A good deal of the soft power of American imperialism, that is its moral claim to hegemony, is being wiped out almost at a stroke: USAID, the biggest world agency of aid to the ‘global south’, has been ‘fed to the wood chipper’ by Elon Musk. The US has withdrawn from the World Health Organisation, and has even proposed proceedings against the International Criminal Court for its bias against the US and Israel.

The proposed protectionist trade war of the new US administration would also strike a massive blow at the remaining economic stability of international capitalism that has underpinned the military power of the US, and will undoubtedly rebound on the US economy itself in the form of even higher inflation, financial crises and the reduction of its own trade. The mass deportation of cheap immigrant labour from the United States would have self-defeating negative economic consequences for its economy as well as on social stability.

At the time of writing it is not possible to know whether the avalanche of proposals and decisions by the new president will be enacted or whether they are outlandish bargaining tools which will may lead to temporary agreements or reduced concessions. But the direction of the new policy is clear. The very uncertainty of the measures already has the effect of alarming and antagonising former and future potential allies and obliging them to act for themselves and seek support elsewhere. This in itself will open up more possibilities for the main enemies of the US. The proposed peace agreement in Ukraine is already benefiting Russia. The mercantilist trade war is a gift to China which can position itself as a better economic partner than the US.

Nevertheless, despite the long-term self-defeating policy of ‘America First’ the US will not cede military superiority to its main enemy China, which is still far from being able to confront the US directly on equal terms. And the new foreign policy is already creating powerful opposition within the US bourgeoisie itself.

The perspective is then a massive arms race and a further chaotic increase in imperialist tensions around the world, with great power conflicts moving towards the centres of world capitalism as well further inflaming its global strategic points.

Conclusion: Trump and the social question

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement came to power promising the electorate more jobs, higher wages and world peace, in place of the lowering of living standards and the ‘endless wars’ of the Biden administration.

Political populism is not an ideology of mobilising for war as fascism was.

In fact the growth and electoral successes of political populism over the last decade or so, of which Trump is the American expression, is essentially based on the growing failure of the alternation of the older established parties of liberal democracy in government to address the deep unpopularity of the dizzying growth of militarism on the one hand, and the pauperising effects of an irresolvable economic crisis on the living conditions of the mass of the population on the other.

But the populist promises of butter instead of guns have been and will be more and more contradicted by reality, and will come up against a working class which is beginning to rediscover its combativity and identity.

The working class, in contrast to the xenophobic ravings of political populism, has no country, no national interests and is in fact the only international class with common interests across borders and continents. Its struggle to defend its living conditions today, which is international in scope - the present struggles in Belgium provide another confirmation of class resistance in all countries - therefore provides the basis for an alternative pole of attraction to capitalism’s suicidal future of imperialist conflict between nations.

But in this class perspective the working class will also have to confront the anti-populist as well as the populist forces of the bourgeoisie which are proposing to the population a return to the democratic form of militarism and pauperisation. The working class must not get caught up in these false alternatives, nor follow the more radical forces which say liberal democracy is a lesser evil to that of populism. Instead, it must fight on its own class terrain.

The New York Times, which is the usually sober mouthpiece of the liberal American bourgeoisie, launched this radical mobilising call to the population to defend the bourgeois democratic state against the autocratic state of Trump in an editorial statement of February 8th 2025:

“Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposely creating with the volume and speed of executive orders; the effort to dismantle the federal government; the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people, and the very concept of diversity itself: the demands that other countries accept Americans as their new overlords: and the dizzying sense that the White House could do or say anything at any moment. All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power, so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. For goodness sake, don’t tune out.”[3]

This is only a confirmation that the whole bourgeoisie is using its own serious divisions to divide the working class into choosing one form of capitalist war and crisis against another in order to make it forget its own class interests.

The working class must not be pulled into the internal or external wars of the ruling class, but fight for itself.

Como

 

[1] The United States: superpower in the decadence of capitalism and today epicentre of social decomposition (Part 1), International Review 169, 2023

[2] The Pax Americana after World War 2 was never an era of peace but of near permanent imperialist war. This term instead refers to the relative stability of world imperialist conflict, with the US as its biggest power, in the preparation of two blocs for world war prior to 1989.

[3] In 2003, the New York Times, with a reputation for objective reporting, nevertheless repeated the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as the pretext for the US invasion of Iraq.