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| 23-February-2025 |
First, he can withdraw US military aid to Ukraine – which he has been talking about doing since long before the US presidential election. If the European states got their act together, which is possible, the effects of this would be constrained.
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| At the “Russian troops out” march in London yesterday |
US diplomats have reportedly threatened to block Ukraine’s access to the Starlink communication system on which its drones rely, potentially giving asymmetrical advantage to Russia.
Second, Trump can cancel sanctions. The latter would bring him into conflict with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017, which was specifically designed to compel the president to lift sanctions only with Congress approval. Of course Trump could play fast and loose with the law, which he has done and is doing in other respects, and/or Congress could go along with him.
The cancellation of sanctions would be bad. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the sanctions were never very effective, in large part because previous US governments, under both Trump and Biden, sought to limit their effect on the oil market and the world economy.
Third, Trump can shift narratives. I broadly agree with people who say we should judge Trump and his cohorts by their actions, not by the constant stream of often incoherent words. Yes, but. Nazi salutes normalise Nazism; speculation about expelling the Palestinian population from Gaza normalises ethnic cleansing; and slandering the Ukrainian president as a “dictator” who started the war in his country reinforces Russian propaganda.
On the third anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion – and the eleventh year of its military attack on Ukraine, and the long chains of suffering it has caused – these are real dangers. It’s not clear how they will play out.
Putin is no doubt thrilled by Trump’s outburst against Ukraine and against Zelensky. He is pushing for the maximum. For now, he is happy to continue sending wave upon wave of young men to die in the scorched earth of eastern Ukraine, and negotiate at a later stage. The Russian economy – which was never going to collapse due to sanctions, as so many commentators irresponsibly claimed in 2022 – can keep going for now.
Putin wants to hold out for a complete military defeat for Ukraine. He knows that the Ukrainian population is exhausted. There are no more volunteers to go to the front, only conscripts. There are great strategic and economic pressures on Putin; he will hope to use Trump to ease these. Perhaps the worst case scenario is the US, Russia and the European powers stitching up a “peace” deal that gives the Kremlin’s militarism a new lease of life.
When Trump first returned to the presidency, there were signs that he would push for a ceasefire, rather than a peace treaty marking Ukraine’s defeat and even break-up. Trump’s outbursts last week suggest he may be moving towards the latter.
But we are still far from the point at which Ukraine would be forced to sign such a treaty, which would surely have to acknowledge that Crimea, and all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, are Russian territory, as the Russian constitution now stipulates.
The Ukrainian government always has the option of walking away. The Ukrainian people, however war-weary, will not accept humiliation.
Not only in Ukraine, but more widely, it’s not only what dictators do that matters. What society does matters too.
Putin’s focus on Ukraine meant that he had to abandon his closest ally in the Middle East, Bashar al-Assad, in the face of popular opposition that he had brutally suppressed for more than a decade. Powerful social movements have in the last two months thrown Putin’s allies in Georgia and Slovakia, and the pro-European but Putinesque regime in Serbia, into crisis. The advance of this new type of 21st-century fascism we are facing is not uniform or uni-directional.
When I make these arguments, some friends and comrades tell me I am being naively optimistic. I don’t accept that. I know fascism when I see it, and I’ve seen it in Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine for the last three years. I have seen how the Israeli government has implemented the fascist right’s genocidal programme in Gaza. All this didn’t start with Trump.
Moreover, I see history as a more complicated process than it might appear to be while it’s happening.
If we are to take seriously the emotions we feel at the deaths and suffering caused by war, we shouldn’t indulge ourselves with foolish optimism – nor with panic and despair.
How to understand Trump in the wider sense? For a start, he is a symptom of the long-term decline of the US empire.
The US economy was 40-50% of the global total after the second world war, now it’s under 25%. In the 1970s, when the US was forced into a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, China, India and Brazil were “developing nations” still largely at the mercy of the imperialist metropole. The US wars of the 1990s and 2000s, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, were murderous attempts by this failing empire to maintain its grip.
Today, rivalry from China is seen as a key underlying motivation of Trump’s Russia policy (i.e. that he wants to pull Russia out of China’s sphere of influence).
The US’s economic and strategic decline takes on social forms: a country with more guns than people, the rise of Christian nationalism, and the election as president of a man with the political style of a street thug.
The assault on the legal system and state institutions, the alliance with billionaire oligarchs, the encouragement for extreme right wing violence (e.g. pardons of 6 January rioters) are all what they look like. Forms of fascism.
When Trump returned to the White House at first, I think I underestimated the murderous nature of his ideology. I thought he was more pragmatic, more of a plaything of big capital. Last week’s outburst can’t be dismissed, though. Trump really admires Putin, and hates democracy, in Ukraine and everywhere else.
Trump instinctively warms to Israel’s extremist government and its genocidal assault on Gaza. He has made clear to Netanyahu that he is happy for the Gaza ceasefire to break down and a new round of genocidal attacks to begin – although, as I understand it, whether and how this will happen will be more Netanyahu’s decision than Trump’s.
What does all this mean for the labour movement and other social movements in the UK and other western European countries?
First, I think we need to separate, analytically, two strands of Trump’s policy. The first is his ideological kinship with dictators and mass murderers like Putin and Netanyahu. The second, related but not the same, is his assault on the alliance between the US and the western European powers.
In the UK media, it is this assault, and the existential threat it poses to NATO, that brings howls of outrage from Labour politicians and liberal commentators – very often the same people who have tolerated Israel’s multiple war crimes (with a few whispered words of criticism), who have slandered all who oppose them as anti-semites, and who re-hash the extreme right’s disgusting anti-migrant rhetoric.
What these Labour politicians and liberals fear is that the whole illusion of the “democratic” post-war order is crashing. For Palestinians, and before them Iraqis, Vietnamese and many others, this “democracy” was always a phantom, an ideological covering for brute imperialist force. I think the post-war order is crashing, and the “democratic” illusion is crashing with it – but I don’t look back on that illusory “democracy” with the same western-centric fondness.
Our democracy in Europe – valuable as it is, and vital as it is to defend every bit of it tooth and nail – has always been married with the violence of empire. Look at the treatment of migrants trying to throw themselves on the mercy of that democracy.
In Ukraine, the UK and French governments are preparing to step in militarily to a void that may be left by the withdrawal of US aid. Right now, we in the labour movement and civil society are on the same side of the war as they are, but fighting with independent aims.
We should continue to build our own kinds of solidarity, supporting Ukrainian resistance, supporting Ukrainian communities, supporting anti-war direct action in Russia.
🔴 This isn’t a comprehensive analysis. I wrote it for self-clarification as much as anything – and thank friends who discussed it with me. Comments welcome. SP, 23 February 2025
🔴 For the last year, a group of us in London have carried the banner in the photo, with its slogan “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime”, on the demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza. Yesterday, the banner was out again, on a march organised by Ukrainian community groups, trade unions and the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, calling for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. Internationalist solidarity between struggles is an essential starting point.
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