CD Forum – Trump, Zionist Genocide and NATO Crisis

Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 30th March. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.

The ceasefire agreed by Israel and touted by Trump in January as his work was openly blown away on 17^th March by Israel with Trump’s full support. The mass terror bombings resumed with the bloodiest day of the genocide so far, with over 400 butchered in one night, many burned alive in their tents.  Since then, this has carried on. This after a fortnight of Gaza being deprived of food, water and fuel. Israel making no bones about openly embarking on mass starvation, freezing and dehydration of Palestinians. The lesson for Russia over Ukraine is clear – Trump’s word is worthless.

This ceasefire never got beyond the first phase of exchanges of batches of 3-6 Israeli hostages for hundreds of Palestinians from Israel’s torture and rape camps. The total blockade of all aid, food and water with the open support of Trump made a sick joke or any second phase. Trump gave Israel the green light for this latest genocide and has hinted that he intends to do the same with the West Bank. Israeli repression has mushroomed in the West Bank. The stooge Palestinian Authority has taken it in turns with the Israelis to attack particularly Jenin. Hospitals and infrastructure are now under similar attacks in the West Bank as in Gaza.

The Palestinians are again receiving the solidarity of Yemen. Amanullah (“Houthi”) leaders have had the courage to stand up for the Palestinians with military action against Israel, against its shipping, and that of its quartermasters in the US and elsewhere. This is not some elite “terrorist” movement, as the imperialists would have it. It has the support of millions of Yemenis who regularly turn out on the streets in their millions to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinian people faced with genocide. Now that Trump, an open genocidaire on the Palestinian question, is in the White House, the whole game of seeking to pressure the US to pressure Israel, which persisted when “Genocide Joe” Biden was in White House, has come to an end.

Trump says that that US would ‘buy’ and forcibly deport the Palestinian population that lives there somewhere else! So that they can have a ‘Riviera’ for the wealthy. This plan was mooted by Trump’s Jewish-Zionist son-in-law, Kushner, last year. Trump’s real aim in saying this is to steal, either for the US, or Israel – or both – the oil and gas reserves that have been found off the Gaza coast in the past decade or so. They are openly saying that “Genocide is good”, not even bothering to deny it. Trump has made clear that he considers Palestinians subhuman – he even uses the word “Palestinian” as a racial epithet akin to “n****r” or “n****r-lover”. His rise to power was funded by Netanyahu’s party, Likud, to the tune of $100 million through Miriam Adelson, of one of the most influential Israeli-US oligarchical dynasties. With Trump in office, both Israel and the US will have to be defeated militarily in some way, by the masses and/or a superior military force to have a hope of stopping the genocide. 

It is hardly surprising that Trump’s attitude to the Yemeni masses is genocidal also. This was shown by the US bombing of the Oncology and Cancer treatment centre in Sanaa, Yemen, on 27^th March. This is exactly what the IDF have been doing in Gaza and now the West Bank. They can’t even lie that this facility is somehow occupied by ‘terrorists’. They just bombed it because they want to stop Yemenis accessing medicine. However, their bombings of Yemen have had zero effect on the military capacity of the Amanullah movement to hit Israel, or to blockade shipping in the Red Sea. Despite the American air strikes, Yemen has a vast array of hidden missile sites buried deep underground that the US has not the means, even with their supposed ‘bunker buster’ bombs, to find and destroy. It also has hypersonic missile technology, which it gained from Iran, and which also has its origins in Russia. Serious military analysts note that the US simply does not remotely have the capacity to defeat Amanullah with aerial bombardment. Given the size of the country, the roughness of the terrain, and the armed capacity of Amanullah, it would take hundreds of thousands of US troops, maybe a million even, to subdue Yemen. They do not remotely have such troops at their disposal. The US has less than half-a-million troops available for such an endeavor now. As well as a population that is wary of such wars, particularly since Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon (1983) and Vietnam.

 As well as the Amanullah movement confronting Zionism, In the background is Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraqi radicals such as Kataib Hezbollah, and Iran itself. All of these are targets of Zionism, and its enforcers. The fact that Iran is four times the size of Iraq, with a much larger population to subdue, and is far more heavily armed than Iraq was, with similar technique to Yemen but in far greater quantity, puts US/Israeli threats against Iran in perspective. All these forces, of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ are steadfast in their defiance of Zionism and imperialism. Though they suffered a serious blow, at least in the short-term, with the overthrow of Assad in Syria at the end of 2024. Syria is now under the rule of Western-backed Al Qaeda/ISIS genocidaires, now known as HTS. The collapse of the Assad regime in December, means the route of communication between Iran and its allies in Lebanon has now been replaced by a genocidal regime of Sunni-sectarian killers. HTS has launched a massive slaughter of tens of thousands from Syria’s Alawite Shi’a and Christian minorities, also killing Sunnis who refuse to cooperate with the slaughter. Up to 30,000, according to some sources.

The reactionary social forces in West Asia/Middle East are shaken but are digging in very hard. It will take deep-going political and social struggles, mobilizing the masses against these forces independently, to really transform this situation. What is needed is both the emergence of a new communist leadership among the Arab and Muslim masses, and the creation of an anti-imperialist united front of all those in conflict with the Zionists, the US and their agents.

For Trump Israel expelling the Gaza population, and the US doing so, are pretty much the same thing. It is piracy, and a motive for genocide. Trump is open about his intentions to steal natural resources of territories he covets. During his first term he openly boasted that US troops in Syria, sent in by Obama in 2014 supposedly to fight ISIS – were there to steal Syria’s oil for the United States. His policies in Ukraine have a similar motive. Like his demand that Ukraine sign over ownership of $500 billion worth of rare earth metals as ‘reparation’ is just naked theft. Though much of this resource is apparently in the Donbass, which is part of Russia now.

The explosion of the Ukraine issue, particularly with Zelensky’s confrontation with Trump and his Vice-President Vance on 28^th February in the Oval Office, has come close to tearing NATO apart. NATO has teetered on the brink of collapse over the past few weeks, as Trump’s changed priorities, have sent the West European bourgeoisie, particularly the British and the French, into paroxysms of rage and warmongering.  Trump and Zelensky came up with a variant of the previous Minsk agreement deceptions. This was hardly hidden – the truce being commenced; the US would restore military and economic aid to Ukraine that Trump had suspended in the aftermath of the confrontation with Zelensky in the Oval Office. Russia has virtually driven Ukraine out from its diversionary incursion into Kursk, in undisputed Russian territory, and has been rapidly advancing in the Donbass.

Putin made a perfunctory show of welcoming the idea of a ceasefire but made it clear that Russia would expect such a pause to mean a route to a permanent solution, not a revamped Minsk. Such a solution would mean the recognition of Crimea as Russian, and likewise recognition of the four provinces that have already voted in referenda to join Russia – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.  And likely similar proper referenda of the populations of Kharkov and Odessa. The eviction from power of the Nazified elements, the acceptance of Ukrainian neutrality and non-NATO status, and a dramatic curtailment of the Ukrainian armed forces, appears to be the Russian objective in negotiations. These have a clear democratic content and should be at least critically supported by genuine socialists. Because of that, these demands are anathema to the West European ruling classes.

The position of the Trump administration over Ukraine is only half-a-break from Biden’s. Instead of simply arming Ukraine, they now threaten to continue Biden’s policy if Putin does not agree to their proposals. But this is not convincing, as they do not have the resources to continue that indefinitely.  Trump regards China, not Russia, as the US’s strategic adversary, as it is on course to surpass the US in economic power in the immediate future. Much of its economic power derives from capitalism overlaid by economic planning, whose origin was in the Chinese revolution – i.e. beyond capitalism. Unlike in Russia, planning in China has continuity and has never been even temporarily broken – China’s powerful billionaire bourgeois class notwithstanding. That is a crucial difference between China and Russia. So, while we see a tactical softening of US treatment of Russia from the Trump administration, this is not true of China. Instead, we see open hatred of “Communist China”. The Cold War rhetoric the Trump administration also uses against its domestic opponents, including the imperialist democrats who it incredibly refers to as “far left Marxists”. 

Much of Trump’s seeming sympathy for Russia is driven by the aim of setting Russia against China. Though this is unlikely, as there is also much imperialist hostility to Russia that, though Trump may have set it to one side for tactical reasons, still runs deep among the capitalists. The Russian state is bound up with a stunted kind of capitalism that is very deformed by many decades of post-capitalist development, which Russia’s weak capitalists cannot conjure away. They are aware of the enmity of the West and Trump’s motives. His threats of tariffs against BRICS have a similar basis. The differences in NATO are severe. We have never witnessed such a falling out of Europe with the United States. The ruling classes of West Europe are accustomed to being Washington’s clients, since World War II. They are not used to being treated with contempt. Washington has woken up to the fact that it is no longer hegemonic. That does not mean that it has lost all its power. But it has lost in Ukraine. Trump’s policy is a temporary retreat to reconsolidate US rule in the Western hemisphere in the short term, with the aim of a later reconquest of hegemony. Hysteria about this change engulfs the ruling classes in Britain, outside the EU, and France and Germany, and smaller powers like Holland, within the EU.

It is resulting in anti-democratic actions that overlap with the Cold War with Russia, but which also encompass bourgeois forces located in other former workers states. Such as Eastern Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania, which are either annexed components of the imperialist state of Germany, ex-workers states and members of the EU, or clients outside, such as Serbia. Attempts to organize Maidan-style ‘colour revolutions’ appear to be in preparation in Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia. An attempt was made last May, to murder Robert Fico, the leftist Prime Minister of Slovakia, who is critical of the Ukraine war. The government of Serbia, politically alike to that of Slovakia in some ways, is also threatened with an EU-incited ‘colour revolution’ (a coup with ‘popular’ trimmings).

We don’t have any regard for the pro-Zionist, anti-migrant government of Victor Orban in Hungary, and even less for the very right-wing popular presidential candidate in Romania, Călin Georgescu, who approves of the pro-Nazi wartime ruler of Romania, General Antonescu. We certainly don’t have any sympathy for the Alternative für Deutschland in (mainly) Eastern Germany, either – it is very right wing, implicitly Nazi, and yet hostile to the Ukraine proxy war. The AfD however also has a left-wing complement/ counterpart in the ASW of Sahra Wagenknecht, who also opposes the proxy war from more of a leftist standpoint and appears to have been deprived of a presence in the Bundestag by electoral machinations from the ruling class parties.

However, all these are hostile to the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Irrespective of whether these political forces are to the right or left in formal terms, what is happening is that a degree of popular resistance to the NATO proxy war is being expressed through them.All express popular unease in former workers states at being drawn into an imperialist war, which could become a European or world-wide nuclear conflict, against Russia. So, we condemn all these attempted coups, assassinations and other atrocities aimed at dragooning these populations into war with Russia.  While these forces represent spontaneous left and right populism, and some have grotesque and unsavoury politics, they are at their very worst not to be equated with the Ukrainian Nazis who under NATO command, are simply continuing what their forebears did on the Eastern front, then under the command of imperialism itself.

Starmer and Macron want to send troops to Ukraine as so-called ‘peacekeepers’. Macron is bigging-up France’s status as a power with a nuclear arsenal, the “Force de Frappe” (“strike force”) independent of United States control, unlike with Britain.  Saying it could put Western and Central Europe under its nuclear umbrella against Russia. Germany, personified by Chancellor-in-Waiting Friedrich Merz, though, ruled out any German participation without Russian consent. Trump has refused to back any West European or NATO armed intervention in Ukraine, ruling out US assistance under NATO’s Article 5 mutual assistance clause. Without that, NATO ceases to be an effective alliance at all.

The hysteria in the ruling class over this has led to various military officers and politicians to raise conscripting the population against Russia. It is not Russia that is threatening to send its troops to menace Britain, France or Germany. It is Britain and France who want to menace Russia at its South-Western border. Now they are planning to send a small but symbolic Anglo-French ‘Reassurance Force’ to Ukraine. Which amounts to a declaration of war against Russia, if Russia chooses to take it that way. All this could mean an aggressive European war in Eastern Europe waged by Britain and France, overseen by the European Union under the President of the European Commission, the right-wing German politician Ursula von der Leyen.

A wave of pathetic military jingoism is coming from the decrepit British ruling class, which under Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Starmer, has been the most virulently militaristic over Ukraine. This leads straight to a threat of conscription here for Ukraine. The top brass of the British army let it be known, through the Daily Telegraph, that the consider this idea absurd. But it continues anyway. The renewed austerity is being driven by the Starmer regime’s commitment to the crusade against Russia over Ukraine. Starmer recently signed a ‘partnership’ to aid Ukraine for 100 years! To finance this, and billions of pounds worth of other promises to Ukraine in terms of military and other expenditure, he has cut ‘foreign aid’ to numerous places. Reeves’ attack on the disabled through cuts in the Personal Independence Payment is also driven by its military aid to Ukraine against its Russian-speaking population, as well to Israel for its genocide. It is more brutal than George Osbourne’s Tory attacks a decade ago. It looks like it has begun to catalyse a revolt at the base of the Labour Party, putting Starmer in political trouble.

Politics is now extremely fluid, and the ruling classes are targeting repression against this potential for political resistance to cohere. The blatant attacks on Palestine protesters in the US is one face of that – the Mahmoud Khailil case, a Green Card holder being detained and threatened with deportation for protesting against genocide, is outrageous and obscene. But it is also sign of weakness and fear from the Zionists, as are the acts of repression in Britain.   There is huge political anger over the Zionist genocide, which has been true for the entire period of Israel’s slaughter, beginning in October 2023. Up to now, there has been a division of consciousness between a widespread understanding of the barbarity of Zionism, and a lack of understanding and/or a nervousness of many politicised people concerning the proxy war in Ukraine.

But a division of the ruling class, as the Trump-induced crisis in NATO, appears to have broken the log-jam. This is reflected among some activists on the left. A whole layer of bureaucratic forces who were pro-Zelensky liberals in socialist garb, centering around the former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, have become much more virulent. Some were already known to be hysterical Russophobes and backers of NATO’’s warmongering, but others preferred to stay in the closet. They have suddenly become much more jingoistic, as NATO came under threat of split and disintegration. But they have also met much stronger and numerous opposition. Many were previously reticent in speaking out in defence of Russia, given the hysteria. But not so much now!  Defence of Russia in this war is a key principled position of communists. Coupled with militant support for the Palestinian struggle against genocide, against oppression, and for national liberation and full equality, these are key elements of the communist programme today.

We need a broader layer of the left to campaign for the working class to combat these wars and genocides, including though political strikes and similar mass actions.  We have been defenders of Russia since the early days of Maidan. We have noticed a gradual drift leftwards among the more serious left on this question, and there are grounds for optimism that this is deepening. We seek the regroupment of subjectively revolutionary aspiring communists and revolutionary socialists in a new international communist movement, a new Communist International, and there are reasons to be more optimistic about this. We need to create an expanded communist movement, and a force that can intervene in electoral terms, and give leadership in anti-war actions, strikes and other class struggles, to give revolutionary leadership in the struggles to come.