THIS THIRD week of February 2025 will go down in history as a turning point in world affairs.

The post-WWII system, extended 35 years ago with the end of the cold war, is dead. It was on life support long before Donald Trump resumed the presidency of the US. He has moved with whirlwind speed over the last month to rip up a dying order of multinational capitalist institutions through which the US exercised hegemony over allies and domination over foes.

Now resuscitation efforts have stopped. Anyone with any sense has called time of death.

The last seven days have led to sheer panic among European leaders. Trump’s moves to cut a deal with Vladimir Putin — perhaps a grand bargain beyond them parcelling up Ukraine — have brought the posturing of EU and British leaders violently against the concrete pavement of reality.

European politicians say they were blindsided. They have been wilfully blind. In a long interview last month US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spelled out the deep thinking of the Trump administration. It is that there is a new emergent, multipolar world.

The US cannot and will not seek to hold the ring any more through a system of permanent and expanding alliances garlanded with pious talk of shared values and nods to liberal democracy and all the other ornamentation. 

He stated bluntly: “The interest of American foreign policy is to further the national interest of the United States of America… And I think that was lost at the end of the cold war, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem.”

It was no surprise. Trump and those around him — more coherent and strategically driven than his previous ramshackle operation — have been crystal clear about this. It was often dismissed as just Donald being Donald, the man who wrote The Art of the Deal, deploying his business approach to politics. Pressure and threats to achieve concessions and then to come to an agreement that leaves the fundamental contours of the global system in place.

So the British government made emollient noises and sent the twice disgraced Lord Mandelson to smooth things over and maintain the fabulated “special relationship.” (For the first time in his life Mandelson might come away empty handed).

There are still some commentators labouring under this illusion that it is all a game. But Trump really means it. So does US capital, most of which is supporting him — for now. Nor is this radically unique, as if there were not already developments in this direction over the last 20 years to a more conflicted, transactional world of early 20th-century imperialism.

In the dying days of Joe Biden’s administration Volodymyr Zelensky included in his fantastical “victory plan” an invitation to US corporations to exploit Ukraine’s vast natural resources. Trump has simply taken up that offer and made an outlandish protection-racket bid of the kind he is used to in the mafia-soaked New York construction industry. 

I should say that any idea that the Ukraine war was simply one of national self-determination, even comparable to Vietnam, ought to have long been discredited. It has been a proxy war and it is heading to a denouement with both powers dividing the spoils.

Trump is demanding an inflated $500 billion and 50 per cent of future revenues. He’s doubling down and there is little that Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron can do about it on their visits to Washington next week.

It is far from the first time that the US has intervened into a crisis-wracked Europe to demonstrate its authority and to enforce terms. It did that a quarter of a century ago, with Britain as ever willing adjutant, over the Kosovo and Balkan wars. This time it is not to assert suzerainty over Europe. It is to accelerate its break-up and a new arrangement between the great powers. That will be no advance. We are entering a more dangerous world.

Nor should anyone with a scintilla of understanding be surprised about Trump’s move to cut a big deal with Putin. Ten years of infantilising rubbish about him being an agent of the Kremlin have obscured some fundamental truths which your average British MP — or government minister — hasn’t got a clue about. 

The twin mandarins of US imperialist strategy at its height in the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, held as an article of faith that Washington must at all costs avoid Moscow and Beijing coming to a close alliance that would dominate the Euroasian landmass and pose a serious challenge to US supremacy. 

That is why Richard Nixon went to China to try to peel away the then weaker of the powers. Trump “going to Russia” is not to do with admiration for another autocrat. It is raw US imperialist interest in the manner that the Trump administration seeks to realise it in this chaotically changing world.

So is the hostility to Europe as evidenced in Vice-President JD Vance’s excoriating speech at the Munich Security Conference last week. Yes, he rehearsed the obsessions of the ethno-nationalist radical right. Like Elon Musk addressing the German fascist AfD two weeks before him to boost its election chances this weekend.

But this was not some unmoored ideological attack against effete, liberal Europeans with a call, as Musk put it, to return to being proud of being (ethnically) German rather than diluting it in European, multicultural identity.

It was West Germany’s post-war conservative leader Konrad Adenauer who said that in order for the country to rise again to lead the continent “we will have to give the people an ideology. It cannot be German. It has to be European.” German, French and British distinct imperialisms were sustained, not erased, in the EU.

Vance and Musk do want to encourage the radical right, and in Musk’s case to relegitimise interwar fascism. Hence the Nazi salute now mimicked by first-term Trump strategist Steve Bannon, with a knowing wink to the crowd.

Driving this, however, is not a band of ideologues, but the ruthless interests of US capital and its state in cracking open the European protected market and economy. Penetrating it in the fields of health insurance, pharmaceuticals, arms manufacture, banking and tech. Europe (and I include Britain) is the sick man of the morphing world system. 

If trying to contain China with trade and military threats is the big game, then in the course of it is the US humbling a crisis-wracked Europe that has plummeted on every measure since 2008 when its economy was comparable to the US’s.

There is talk of a “European army” to step into the breach left by the end of US “security commitments,” which might soon mean pulling US forces out of Nato bases in eastern Europe. But the “army” is in fact an attempt to lash together half a dozen states, not the EU as a whole. Talk of it is already widening divisions in the continent.

Neither Germany nor Poland — which has a large, modern army to project its own regional power — say they will deploy troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace agreement. That is the ceasefire and agreement that the last four British prime ministers have insisted must not take place because Ukraine must fight on, and on…

It is perhaps Britain and the political dunderhead Keir Starmer who stand most exposed by this shock realisation that the world has changed — into what, is an open question.

After a snap poll indicating modest support for Starmer’s vainglorious suggestion of sending British troops to Ukraine after a ceasefire that he doesn’t want, two further surveys showed growing opposition. It was strongest among Reform voters.

That didn’t stop Nigel Farage, the supposed disrupter and cheeky bloke down the pub, aligning with the rest of the British Establishment in endorsing the idea and criticising Trump for pulling back from Ukraine. The radical and far right are a global phenomenon. But they are driven by imperialist and national antagonisms. Those mean that while sharing ideological weapons or even worldview they are not some united International of reaction.

An attempt to create a fascist International in 1934 at a conference in Switzerland foundered. The two actual fascist states, Germany and Italy, did not take part and nearly came to armed conflict months later over who would dominate semi-fascist Austria.

Germany was of course the defeated power in WWI. The Carthaginian peace of Versailles imposed on Germany and the “stab-in-the-back” legend fuelled violent reaction of all kinds and ultimately the rise of the Nazis. 

Zelensky’s is not a fascist regime. But it does rest upon support from fascists and ultra-nationalists, who were named as such by Western governments until white-washing them when Russia invaded. 

He has already introduced the claim that Ukraine would have won if its allies — pre-Trump — had fully backed him. He was demanding Nato go to direct war with Russia.

That stab-in-the-back myth is now likely to be taken up by outright fascists in control of their own Ukrainian military units.

In Britain the radical left stands vindicated in opposing our governments’ role in escalating the Ukraine war right from when Boris Johnson pushed Zelensky to block negotiations with Russia to halt the illegal invasion.

Now the chancellor is inviting vulture-capitalists such as BlackRock to advise on implementing Austerity 2.0 while ratcheting up arms spending beyond the increase that was in last year’s manifesto.

Imperialist war and chaotic reordering. Global militarism. Austerity and social regression. The threat of fascism.

We need stronger united movements and a combative socialist left that can deliver us from these disasters. 

Britain is lucky to have a Stop the War Coalition and collaborative efforts to fight the incoming wave of austerity. We should build them.