DONALD TRUMP’S presidency is an opportunity to challenge Britain’s “special relationship” with Washington and the Nato war machine.
Both Trump and his liberal opponents present his movement as one disrupting these old alliances. Trump derides allies for not pulling their weight and even talks of seizing their territory. Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic see this as a threat to the US-policed world order.
The reality is that Trump is not the threat to US hegemony, but an answer to it being threatened by the rise of China. The immediate impact of his attacks on Nato allies is a rush on their part to prove their loyalty, promising higher military spending in response to his demands. Denmark’s reaction to a threat to annex Greenland is to plead that it is open to any expansion of the US military presence there that the Pentagon might want.
The threats form part of a shift in US strategy that recognises the end of the unipolar order. Recognises — not accepts.
Trump eyes up Greenland and Canada because of their importance to control of Arctic sea routes opening up because catastrophic climate change is melting the ice, and for the exploitation of the region’s natural and mineral resources this allows.
His proposed seizure of the Panama Canal rests on fictional claims it is under Chinese occupation: his motive is to block it to Chinese shipping. “Free trade” was always the mantra of unchallenged superpowers: Britain when it was the only industrialised country, the United States in the era of “globalisation.”
That time is past. The US is overwhelmingly the greatest military power on Earth, spending more on its armies than the next 10 countries combined; its inflated stocks dominate markets, with the US stock market reaching 74 per cent of the Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index last year. China, however, dominates both the production and distribution of real things: it accounts for over a third of global manufacturing (more than the next nine countries combined) and half of global shipbuilding by tonnage, operating the world’s biggest merchant fleet.
The US has, through sanctions and military encirclement, long been committed to derailing China’s economic growth. Trump is simply more openly hostile to the framework of international institutions that once worked to serve US mastery and no longer do. Even there the differences should not be exaggerated, given Joe Biden’s attacks on international courts for seeking to hold Israel to account. The broad trajectory of US imperialism towards war with China remains the same: it would be a calamity of unthinkable proportions, and detaching Britain from the war band must be a priority for the whole left.
Here, Trump’s unpopularity in this country is an advantage. He has his imitators, and the threat posed by the likes of Nigel Farage are very real. But Reform UK’s links to the United States — its ties to US capital, its willingness to serve US corporate interests through further privatisation of the NHS — expose its hollow pretence at “patriotism” and can undermine its appeal.
Only, however, by mounting a genuine anti-Establishment movement can we spike the guns of Reform’s fake one.
Denouncing Reform for wanting to privatise the NHS will cut no ice if we do not resist the Labour government’s moves in the same direction. Calling out Farage’s ties to Trump will have no effect if we are silent on the fact Starmer too is an obedient servant of the White House. And sounding the alarm on the threat the far right pose to democracy is empty if not combined with a robust campaign to defend our freedoms from an increasingly repressive British state seeking to criminalise peaceful protest.
Trump is a morbid symptom: we should not confuse it with the underlying disease. Capitalism means war. Rebuilding a mass socialist movement that confronts the system itself is the only way to end the madness.
