Seven months of Trump's presidency: Imperialist war, austerity, the threat of civil war

In a speech at the United Nations in September 2025 United States President Donald Trump claimed that, in the first 7 months of his second term as president, he already had ended 7 ‘unendable’ wars: those of Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, Congo and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

At most these conflicts have seen ceasefires (not all engineered by Trump) but there has been no peaceful resolution of them and they are ready to reignite at any moment. Moreover, the major wars of Trump’s tenure that he inherited from President Biden between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Gaza have in the main worsened despite Trump’s intention to end them from day one of his presidency. The current ceasefire in Gaza (10.10.25), allowing the survivors of the massacre to return to the rubble of their homes, will bring at best a pause in the horror of interminable war in the Middle East.

The BBC amongst other media outlets have delighted at poking fun at the obvious untruth of Trump’s claim. But there was an intended message behind his bluff: that the United Nations (instigated by the United States in 1945) has been unable to provide the peace that it was set up to maintain (which is true), and now only he and his unilateral policy of America First, also known as ‘Make America Great Again’, is capable of engineering world peace.

The reality behind this episode only shows that around the world, imperialist conflicts, great and small, are multiplying all the time today, and that not only the transnational institutions of liberal democracy, like the UN, have been incapable of ending them, but neither has the bluff of populist nationalism. A capitalist peace in any form is impossible today and only a class with internationalist interests, the working class, is capable of achieving peace through the overthrow of national states on a world scale.

This uncompromising perspective, the only one that conforms to the long-term reality of the situation, has been the defining difference between the Communist Left and all other supposed revolutionary political tendencies like the Trotskyists or Anarchists that always claim, in the midst of the carnage, support for the ‘lesser evil’ imperialisms whether for Palestine today, North Vietnam in the 1960s or democratic allied imperialism in the Second World War.

US geopolitical hegemony since 1945: into the wood chipper

If we want to make an accurate assessment of Trump’s first 7 months of office, we have to go beyond the affirmation that his administration has continued to pursue the wars, austerity and repression of all previous capitalist governments. We have to explain what has been radically different about his presidency in regard to previous ones, even in comparison with his first term of office, (2016-2020) in order to understand the particularly serious dangers the US situation holds for the working class.

No other Communist Left group, has been capable of making this analysis, of warning of the threats and traps in store, since they only see ‘more of the same’ in the first months of Trump’s presidency.[1]

In previous articles on Trump’s coming to power at the beginning of this year we have pointed out that his policy of America First would not have the desired effect of restoring the United States to greatness on the world stage.[2]

On the contrary Trump’s first months have accelerated, at full speed, the weakening of US geopolitical hegemony - known as the Pax Americana – in favour of a growing free-for-all by its former allies and enemies alike.

US imperialism dominated the world from 1945-89 because it was the gendarme of the most powerful imperialist bloc. But its victory after the collapse of the weaker, rival Eastern bloc, turned out to be a Pyrrhic one. The removal of the threat of Russian imperialism loosened the chains that previously held the nations of the Western bloc together in subservience to the US. The period 1989-2025 has consequently seen the fruitless attempt of the US to maintain its previous hegemony despite the massively destructive and bloody display of its military superiority.

The radical contribution of Trump has been to turn a vice into a virtue and instead of trying to repair American domination as previous US presidencies have done, he has attempted to break it up altogether, lambasting it as a ‘con’ perpetrated by its allies to ‘screw’ the US. Instead of trying to abate the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ in imperialist relations that has been weakening US power since 1989, the second Trump administration has become its principal advocate on the world stage.

Throwing all the fixtures and fittings of the Pax Americana onto the scrap heap has been the Trump presidency’s most historic achievement. The first days of his second administration witnessed his appetite for annexing Greenland, Panama, and Canada; all allies of the US. But his most dramatic reversal of previous US policy was in the questioning of US commitment to NATO, the military alliance that has always been the centrepiece of the Western Bloc and provided the model for US alliances in other geopolitical theatres. The US was now ambivalent about its recognition of the crucial article of the NATO charter that in effect provides US support to any European member threatened by Russia. The now haphazard diplomacy of US toward its defence of Ukraine has encouraged the Kremlin to intensify its military invasion of that country and make threatening actions to Eastern European NATO countries, Poland, Latvia, Rumania, Estonia.

Knowing that its backer of last resort has in effect deserted it, the main powers of Western Europe are now forced to try to become militarily independent of the US and radically increase arms spending, with all the implications that has for the spread of war to Europe, the further bankruptcy of their economies and the pauperisation of a restive working class.

Trump has claimed this divorce with Europe as a victory but in reality it represents, long term, a weakening of the hold of the US over one of the world’s most important industrial heartlands.

The same fraying of US hegemony has developed in the Middle East, where foreign policy under Trump has become an adjunct of the regional imperialist ambitions of Israel at the expense of the US's own interests in maintaining the balance of power and its other alliances in the area. In the Far East the disregard of the US for its commitment to its former allies - Japan, Australia and India - puts in question the policy of containment of its main imperialist rival China, which has benefited from the greater margin of manoeuvre thus permitted.

At least Trump, in his open contempt for the US’s former leadership of the Western Bloc, has finally removed the illusion that the parameters of the Cold War remain the same - the polarisation of world imperialism around two major axes - and confirmed the reality that we are now fully in a multi-polar epoch, where the possibility of the formation of blocs is less and less likely, but which makes the proliferation of imperialist conflict in all areas of the world the norm.

Incredibly there are those on the Communist Left who are still living nostalgically in the Cold War and believe that the imperialist conflicts multiplying today are harbingers of World War 3. This would mean that the world’s working class was already defeated. Yet it is precisely the undefeated nature of the working class today that helps to define the current period and the improbability of the formation of new imperialist blocs.

These antique groups of the Communist Left are like the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda who refused to accept until 1974 that World War 2 had ended 29 years earlier. In fact these groups are even more obtuse, since 36 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall they are still looking at the world through Cold War glasses. 

Goodbye to US soft power

It is not just at the diplomatic/military level that the Trump presidency has undermined US world leadership. All the ‘transnational’, ‘soft’ institutions that gave a humanist, international, pluralistic veneer to the American bloc - economic, trade, financial, social, environmental, health - that the US has dominated and financially supported since 1945 (the World Trade Organisation, the G7 meetings of industrialised nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, World Health Organisation), all of them have lost the support of the new administration. The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, was, until Trump effectively abolished it in February 2025, the world’s largest agency for foreign aid previously having an average budget $23billion a year.

The imposition by Trump of massive trade tariffs on the rest of the world, allies and foes alike, has been the most dramatic illustration of an abrupt economic change in the US policy of globalisation and free(ish) trade. Other countries, according to the Trumpian justification of this policy, have been cheating the US, such as the EU, when in fact the latter and its antecedents have been the vehicle for the economic integration of Western Europe under the aegis of the United States.

The Trumpian illusion is that the US can use its military and economic superiority to make the rest of the world pay for the crisis. But such a policy will inevitably backfire on the economic level as well, as the Tariff offensive is already beginning to show, destabilising the dollar as the lynchpin of the world economy.

Whether at the ideological, economic or military level the US has, under Trump, abandoned any hegemonic intentions in favour of the dubious benefits of disrupting the existing order. ‘American First’, and unpredictability, is not a unifying perspective and method. The reverse, in fact.

The US is no longer a bastion of stable government

Hitherto a major pillar of American world power was that it existed internally as a stable bastion of liberal democracy; a moral and political example to its allies and a rallying cry against the despotism of the Eastern Bloc and more recently to ‘revisionist’ powers like Russia, China and Iran. 

At the end of his first presidential term Trump already deliberately targeted the holy edicts and places of American liberal democracy by encouraging the armed assault of his supporters on the Washington Capitol in January 2020 to try and overturn the legal vote for Joe Biden. He made the American nation look like a ‘banana republic’ to the rest of the world according to former president George W Bush. Trump has continued along the same track in his second term, breaking convention after convention of liberal democratic norms. He has manipulated the judiciary - supposedly independent of political interference - by forcing the sacking or indictment of his enemies within the state machine, and their potential imprisonment, notably James Comey former director of the FBI. He is trying to pressurise the Federal Reserve Board and its director Jay Powell, also supposedly independent of the short-term needs of the government in power, to lower interest rates. He’s even sacked the head of statistics when she announced the ‘wrong’ employment figures.

Recently Trump has fabricated pretexts to use the military to intervene in civil disturbances such as the protests against the deportation of immigrants in Los Angeles, or crime as in Washington DC, Portland or Chicago thereby corrupting the independence of the armed forces from political interference and using them to discredit and usurp the authority of the Democratic Party-elected regimes in these cities. The militarisation of the operations of ICE - Immigration and Customs Enforcement - is another populist flouting of democratic procedure.

It used to be a liberal, bi-partisan norm that the heads of US government departments - health, defence, environment etc - would either be competent in their fields or respectful of the permanent experts employed in these departments. This has also been given a populist makeover. Most grotesquely the opponent of vaccinations, and believer that circumcision is likely to cause autism, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been appointed health secretary, while Pete Hegseth, previously employed as a talk show host on Fox News, is put in charge of the defence (now ‘war’) department. Recently he commanded US generals around the world to come to Washington to hear a lecture on the need to be fit and shave off beards!

When the president declares that climate change is a ‘con’ then it is obvious that the Environmental Protection Agency is not going to bound by scientific advice. The new administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, said ‘we are driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.’

Trump has retained only one criteria for the appointment of the leaders of state bureaucracies - loyalty to himself.

Trump’s 7 months have therefore been a full scale attack on all the pillars of US power since 1945, whether military, strategic, economic, political or ideological. These bases were already being undermined by the loss of direction and perspective that developed after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc; the failure of its military attempts to preserve its hegemony; and the fallout from the Great Recession of 2008.

But for the populist Trump the cause of the decline of US imperialism was the result of one of the very factors that were responsible for its previous ascendancy: its liberal democratic ethos. By desecrating this guiding spirit Trump believes he can rejuvenate American capitalism and recover the ascendancy of another era.

However, it would be wrong to see that this reversal has been the result of Trump himself - despite his claims. Trump is only the most dramatic expression of a universal populist political trend that has been gaining ground in the period of decomposition, at the expense of liberal democracy.

Trump, populism and the decay of liberal democracy

Francis Fukuyama, a prominent US political expert, famously declared after the fall of the Berlin Wall: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” -  Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989)

Since then, he has had to change his opinion about the victory of liberal democracy and reject the corresponding illusion of the neoconservatives around president George W Bush that the US was, after 1989, going to lead a unipolar world.

The collapse of Stalinism was merely the precursor of a generalised decay of the political forms of capitalist rule in the period of the decadence - and more recently, decomposition - of the bourgeois order. The one-party state of the Russian bloc developed in particular to satisfy the imperialist military needs of the Second World War and its aftermath. But its economic weakness increasingly undermined the inflexibility of the state in the face of the long world economic crisis beginning in the 1960s, eventually leading to complete collapse.

However, the regimes of the Western Bloc also began to lose their raison d’être after the defeat of their main imperialist adversary after 1989. The liberal democratic states and their ideology had cohered around the imperialist perspectives of the Western Bloc. But increasingly, after the removal of its main opponent, this disciplined respect for liberal norms uniting all the bourgeois factions behind the state was removed, and the liberal democratic regimes begin to mimic the endemic corruption and every-man-for-himself mentality typical of the operation of the Stalinist regimes.

This tendency to lose political control was exacerbated by the ineluctable worsening of the economic crisis, especially the consequences of the officially-named 2008 Great Recession that had to be paid in full… by the working class. At the same time the multiplication of ‘forever wars’ around the globe was directly involving the Western liberal democratic regimes and their budgets. The promise of peace and prosperity made by the West after 1989 was given the lie. The tattered credibility of the traditional parties of liberal democracies was revealed in the steady loss of their percentage of the vote.

This void was filled by populist political forces, whose general character consisted of castigating only the symptoms of the failures of capitalism and of offering irrational panaceas: the replacement of long-term imperialist diplomacy and alliances with incoherent, nativist nationalism that corresponds more to the free-for-all reigning on the world stage; the blaming of elites - the huge parasitic state bureaucracies, Wall Street, and well-paid experts for the economic crisis - scapegoating immigration and other foreigners for the decline of living standards; replacing the woke ideology of liberalism with common sense traditional values.

Populism is revealed not as an opponent of capitalism, democracy and the democratic state. After all it was President Abraham Lincoln who defined government in a populist way: ‘the rule of the people, by the people, for the people’. No, the populist enemy is the traditional liberal practice of the democratic state that has supposedly distorted the meaning of the rule of the people and excluded them from power.

Populism is not a new political phenomenon but an incoherent reaction, from fractions of the ruling class, to the inevitable contradictions and limitations of the liberal representative form of the bourgeois state.

The pretence of this state to rule in the name of the people is inevitably exposed in practice by the exploitation and repression of the mass of population in the interest of a minoritarian ruling class by the state. The mass of the population is deliberately excluded from direct participation in political power by the representative principle of the state. The popular forms of democracy that arose in the bourgeois revolutions (English, American, French) had to be crushed in order to stabilise the new bourgeois states. The liberal representative democracies of the 19th century - with the exception of the US - excluded the majority of the population from the vote. Universal suffrage only becomes generalised after the First World War, when the workers parties had betrayed and been integrated into the bourgeois state and legislative functions have largely passed into the hands of the Leviathan executive, so the workers vote therefore has minimal effect on the direction of capitalist policy. Hence the regular call of parts of the bourgeoisie to restore the impossibility of ‘power to the people’.

What’s new today is that right wing political populism has become more than an oppositional pressure valve for the liberal establishment and, because of the conditions described above in the period of decomposition, has actually taken political power in what were previously the most politically stable of the capitalist regimes of the world.

The coming to power of populism is a cure that is worse than the disease for the interests of the whole bourgeoisie. Firstly of course populism has no real alternative solutions to war or crisis; it is characterised essentially only by amateurish methods, vandalising policies and the fermenting of chaos and scandals that exacerbates the real problems instead of solving them. Populist leaders, once ensconced in power, prove themselves just as corrupt and depraved as the elitist figures they are replacing. Typically, the repugnant Jeffrey Epstein scandal has implicated Trump as well as Clinton for example. Trump himself has become a multi-billionaire. Instead of creating wealth and jobs for the working class his tariff policy has proved to be a regressive tax on the poorest. As has the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ which will deprive more millions of workers from access to healthcare. Protectionism will hardly expand US manufacturing as it is claimed to do[3]

Populism in power in effect becomes ‘populism for plutocrats’ as the astute organ of the bourgeoisie, the Financial Times, says.

Trump and the working class

Trump was elected partly because of dissatisfaction with falling living standards under Biden. But poverty levels are continuing to rise under Trump, inflation continues to cut into wages, unemployment will rise partly because of savage cuts in federal employment and because of the mirage of the expanding bubble of Artificial Intelligence. The latter is attracting vast investment in the United States precisely because it has the capacity to vastly eliminate more jobs. But the further misery this will inflict on the working class will only accentuate the crisis of overproduction and the financial crashes that are its logical consequence.

We are seeing then, exemplified in the US, not only the crumbling of the liberal democratic political edifice but also the unmasking of its populist alter ego, in the face of a working class which hasn’t submitted passively to the further austerity that will continue to be demanded by the irresolvable crisis of capitalism and all factions of the bourgeoisie.

It might appear then that the working class can, in the face of the present political turmoil of the bourgeoisie, put forward its own class demands and ultimately the perspective of its own political power.

But the bourgeoisie is able to use its own political putrefaction and internal conflicts against its principal class enemy to divide the working class, suppress its class identity and steer it into false battles and objectives. The one advantage for the bourgeoisie in the ascension of political populism is that it creates a false debate, a diversionary conflict, that steers the working class away from understanding the real causes of its pauperisation and its own class solution. As the Financial Times said of the rise of populism in Britain in 2016: ‘let them eat Brexit’.[4]

In fact, this splitting of the working class is what is happening in the US today: the working class is being asked to actively take sides either for the outrages of populism or for liberal democracy, to choose between different exploiters and executioners. The leftists are particularly active in trying to mobilise workers behind the ‘lesser evil’ of the Left of the Democratic Party in the US.

Unfortunately, parts of the Communist Left, deliberately blind to the reality of the situation, are giving ground opportunistically to the ‘democratic movements’ that are part of the false oppositions proposed by the bourgeoisie, in the false hope of turning them into genuine proletarian struggles.

The working class, in order to defend its interests, will have to fight all factions of the ruling class and not get caught up in a struggle which is not its own. The revolutionary movement has since Marx rejected the mystification of democracy and equality in capitalism - whether of the liberal or populist kind - because the bourgeois order has always been riven by a class exploitation that is cemented by state oppression. Marx’s synonym for ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ was ‘Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery’.

Against the dictatorship of capital whatever its guise - liberal democratic, fascist, populist or, Stalinist - the working class will eventually have to oppose its own class dictatorship embodied in the workers councils that were first deployed in the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions.

To conclude: the 7 months of President Trump’s second term have been perfectly in keeping with US capitalism’s need for more wars, exploitation and immiseration of the working class and repression. Trump’s special contribution has been to irreparably trash the facade of US liberal democracy in every domain and therefore further weaken US imperialist leadership on the world arena and provide a massive stimulus to capitalist chaos both internally and externally.

The present and future danger for the working class is that it will be dragged into the more and more violent conflict between populist and liberal wings of the bourgeoisie.

It must autonomously remain on its own class terrain where it continues to struggle for its own class interests that will inevitably bring it up against the ruling class as a whole, and not one or other of its competing factions.

Como 11.10.2025