Donald Trump is ensconced in the White House, and it is an open question what will be the impact of this in several major conflicts around the world. Regarding the second Trump presidency and Ukraine: it is an open question what will happen now. Despite some challenges from leftists alleging that he has said nothing about this, he has attacked the firing of US ATACMS missiles into Russia, nominally under the aegis of Ukraine, but really fired by US military staff and using targeting data from US satellites and called it very dangerous – embodying the potential to trigger WWIII. He has also stated, since the election, that the expansion of NATO to Ukraine was what caused the Ukraine war. A justified response to this might be “No Shit, Sherlock”, but this has been unsayable in bourgeois politics for years. But not anymore.
What will happen now is anyone’s guess. Trump wants to negotiate a deal to ‘freeze’ the Ukraine conflict. That would be a Minsk III, in effect, or perhaps another Astana – the 2020 deal that supposedly ‘froze’ the Syrian conflict and allowed the jihadist enclave of Idlib to remain untouched so it could later run amok. There is no chance Russia will go for that, and nor should it. Russia is winning, and from the point of view of the international working class, is fighting a progressive war against imperialist-backed genocidal Nazi attacks on the Russian/Russophone people of Donbass and Crimea. Just recently in Ukraine, Russian forces have liberated Kurahkovo, a major fortified stronghold in what was the Donetsk Peoples Republic (now acceded to Russia), comparable to Artyomovsk, which gives Russia a virtual open door to liberate larger spaces in the North West of the DPR, and further protects Donetsk city which has been a major target of Nazi attacks on DPR civilians using petal mines, cluster bombs and depleted uranium.
Some Russian commentators, for instance those who are vocal on the Russia Today TV channel, think that when such initiatives fail, Trump will re-escalate the war, to give himself cover so he doesn’t get accused to handing Ukraine to Putin. But that may also be difficult for him, as the US has limited means these days, and he evidently has other things in mind in his US-nationalist project. Such as stealing the Panama Canal for the US, potentially forcing Denmark to sell Greenland, and even a proposal for unification of the US with Canada. He refuses to rule out force regarding Panama and Greenland.
What he is looking for regarding Canada is Hitler-like and recalls the creation of the Greater German Reich in 1938 through unification or Anschluss with Austria. That might appear at first glance to be an absurd, comic-book policy, but it could have coherence as the expression of Trump’s programme of MAGA (Make America Great Again) in the context of his mooted US retreat from NATO and interfering in Europe. His calls for European NATO countries to spend more on ‘defence’ to make up for a US defeat make logical sense as part of this programme. This could be a coherent, Hitler-like programme to rearm the US for a future assertion of US power – at first locally in the Americas.
Is Trump really going to coerce Denmark to cede – or sell – Greenland to the US? Greenland is a Danish colony, albeit with ‘home-rule’. It is a large expanse of snow and ice and has a very small population, partly of indigenous Inuits (Eskimos), partly of long-time inhabitants of Scandinavian ancestry, when Norse voyagers settled there over the last 1100 years or so. This relationship therefore long predates capitalism and Greenland stayed with Denmark when it separated from Norway in the early 19th Century. Its total population is small, only around 52,000 people.
Greenland is wealthy in minerals. And the seas around it that might become important sea routes as the Arctic unfreezes because of global heating. Trump of course is totally hostile to any programme of preserving the natural environment from global heating, and his programme of capitalist expansion banks on such warming preceding apace. This is an insane policy from the point of view of medium-term human survival, but that is what his MAGA project is all about – grabbing what the US oligarchs can today to fortify them against the working masses who will inevitably revolt against the destruction of their habitat. Trump says obtaining Greenland, and even Canada is a ‘national security issue’. And some elements of this claim to Greenland have even seeped into popular consciousness in the US. The 2020 Hollywood sci-fi movie Greenland, where Greenland is used as a shelter for part of the US population in the face of human extinction from a collision of Earth with a comet, shows how the Trumpian demand for Greenland has entered popular consciousness and culture. Anschluss with Canada and buying Greenland the way the US bought Alaska from Russia in the 19th Century might be feasible as a policy of US retrenchment. This has echoes of the way Hitler rearmed Germany in the 1930s, though it may not be identical in the sense of actual terrorist dictatorship. Whether the US bourgeois will allow Trump to go as far as that is not clear yet. And how the US working class will respond either way is not clear either.
Trump alleges that the Panama Canal is now controlled by the Chinese Army and supposedly rips off the US. This is self-pitying nonsense in factual terms, and the way that the US has often justified its aggression, echoing Zionism with a fake ‘victim’ narrative. But aggression in Central America and the Caribbean has been normal behaviour for US presidents since the 19th Century at least. There is also the potential threat to Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, which could be a major issue if Trump’s policy really is an Anschluss with Canada and regional retrenchment of the US in the Americas as a preparation for more expansion later. Trump is 78 years old and may not achieve such an imperialist retrenchment during this presidency. He may want a legacy that points this way though, for his upcoming Vice-President James. D. Vance to continue with in the future.
In terms of the conflicts and genocide in the West Asia/Middle East region, this also interacts with Trump coming to power. Netanyahu is keen on Israel being provided with enhanced opportunities to attack Iran now that Syria has fallen to the pro-Israel/Türkiye jihadists. But some in Israel are even talking of war with Türkiye and predicting that the rise to power of the ISIS/Al Qaeda-derived Hay’at al-Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) jihadists led by Ahmad Al-Sharaa (Julani) in Syria will not end well for Israel. This may be just paranoia and Islamophobia, as HTS are ferocious in their sectarian terror against non-Sunni Syrians, but servile to Israel. But Israel has already taken unprecedented, drastic military action against the ‘new’ Syria, while its government was in collapse and flux, including destroying much of its army, navy and air force, occupying an expanded chunk of the South Syrian Golan Heights, Mount Hermon, and even Syria’s most important dam, the Al Mantara – amounting to 40% of Syria’s water facilities. This potential collapse of Syria into a failed state for a period makes Türkiye, a powerful and mainly Muslim country, appear nearer to Israel in geopolitical terms, and the Zionists regard any such coherent state as a threat to them. The complication is that unlike Syria, Iraq and Libya, Türkiye is a NATO member.
Meanwhile, among the sectarian brutality and massacres in Syria carried out by HTS and co, a resistance movement operating has emerged in Syria, which is secular. It is operating and may gain traction. ISIS, and the Syrian and Iraq conflicts, have effectively demolished the Sykes Picot line between Syria and Iraq, drawn by British and French imperialism in WWI. This could lead to a broadening of conflict across the Sykes-Picot line and potentially redraw the map. If there is an insurgency by secular/Shia/Alawite/Christian forces they could get help from Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon. These are possibilities. And Trump was earlier threatening not only Iran, but possible military intervention in support of Israel against the genocide victims in Gaza. The current ceasefire, however, looks suspiciously like a recognition of Israel’s parlous state and an attempt by Trump to save Netanyahu from defeat and oblivion. And Trump is also threatening US sanctions a against the International Criminal Court because of its arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.
Indonesia joining BRICS as a full member is a significant step forward. BRICS is a very limited anti-imperialist economic bloc and has proven open to infiltration. Saudi Arabia, around the edges of BRICS played an important role in undermining Syria. Idlib should have been crushed, but instead by Russian, Chinese and Syrian agreement an illusory deal, at Astana, was done in 2020 to ‘freeze’ the Syrian conflict, allowing the imperialist-backed jihadists to rearm. And Syria compromised with Saudi and the UAE for re-admission to the Arab League. That did not stop Assad being overthrown by forces allied to those countries. This was a similar mistake to the Minsk agreements earlier in the Ukraine conflict, but much more costly.
But the function of BRICS is to negate US-Western sanctions against ‘disobedient’ global South countries. ‘No sanctions’ against members is a basic rule of BRICS. This is its progressive aspect. Cuba and Bolivia are now associate members of BRICS, Brazil BRICS chair this year, as Russia was last year. But Brazil vetoed the admission of Venezuela: a capitulation to the current Yankee campaign of threats and aggression against BRICS. Though they didn’t veto Cuba, which is still a workers’ state, and still more hated by the US. This shows inconsistency and an empirical, cowardly response to US bullying and threats. Such things won’t endear Lula and co to Trump.
Then we have the various travails of Elon Musk, the far-right oligarch and world’s richest man, and Trump. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook, Instagram and Threads are abandoning fact checkers and Facebook is supposedly opening to political postings again. Facebook will apparently recommend political posts again, which is contrary to its practice in the past few years. This appears like grovelling to Trump and his ally Musk, who owns X/Twitter, though the left may benefit from it for a while. What happens in the US on social media is likely to spread here. For now, these right-wing populists feel secure and that they have popular backing.
However, with the discredit of liberalism, when the right-wing screw up – they will – they are likely to face class-anger, not liberalism. Luigi Mangione’s shooting dead of the grotesque, profiteering CEO of United Healthcare in the US, and the popular Robin Hood type celebration of him are a sign that class sentiment is building. Quite a few of those who sympathized with that attack are Trump supporters. Though obviously Trump is not too keen, and neither is Musk. Such sentiment is an implicit threat to the entire elite of neoliberal oligarchs.
Musk conflicts with many in the Trump camp over immigration policy. Musk wants skilled IT workers to get visas and be able to work for employers such as himself. Trump’s other far-right ideologue/bedfellow, Steve Bannon, denounced him in bilious terms as a ‘racist’ for mooting that idea. Musk’s activities abroad are those of a dangerous far right provocateur. That is also true of his attacks on political figures in the UK, including Starmer and Jess Philips, over so called ‘grooming gangs’. Not that we sympathise with them, but we denounce Musk’s filth about grooming gangs, as he is trying to incite the far right against the Muslim communities in the UK of South Asian descent. He is even intervening to promote the imprisoned fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) against Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform. In Germany, Musk is promoting the AfD (Alternative for Germany) far right party – and not primarily because of its widely known and popular hostility to German support for Zelensky in Ukraine. This is just as much about the AfD’s general reaction and Islamophobia. The AfD is similar to Trump and Victor Orban in Hungary: hostile to the Ukraine war, but very pro-Zionist. That’s why Musk likes them, evidently. Musk is a dangerous fascist oligarch. We live in interesting times, to put it mildly.
