4 November 2024
Text and audio of the presentation at an IBT online forum on 3 November 2024, two days before the US presidential election.
On Tuesday, the US holds its presidential election between frontrunners Kamala Harris, the current Democratic vice president, and Donald Trump, the former Republican president. Setting aside much of the political spectacle and sideshow distractions that comes with American politics, the election takes place amidst considerable instability in two geopolitical theaters of strategic importance to US imperialism.
In the Middle East, Israel’s year-long genocidal war on Gaza, military assault on Lebanon and provocative attacks on Iran threaten to plunge the entire region into war. In Europe, NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine poses the possibility of a direct military conflict between the West and Russia, in what could be a nuclear conflagration in which billions could potentially die.
The US today is an empire in decline. In the 30-plus years since the fall of the Soviet Union, the role of American imperialism as the pre-eminent world power has diminished substantially. The imperialist military adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria that were designed to reassert US control over Central Asia and the Middle East (aka, the “war on terror”) were utter disasters for Washington. The US spent a staggering $8 trillion dollars on the wars, only for them to end in humiliating defeat for the United States and its NATO partners.
Not only have the “endless wars” cost endless amounts of money, they have significantly tarnished the reputation of American imperialism as the unquestionable global hegemon in the 21st century. Perhaps no other image best captures this failure than that of the Taliban victoriously marching into Kabul in August 2021 as US forces scrambled to withdraw. All these missteps, which are rooted in a deeper crisis of American capitalism, have combined to create new openings for geopolitical realignments.
Within the “multipolar” global context China and Russia have emerged as “great power” challengers to US hegemony in East Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. China is not an imperialist power, but what Trotskyists call a deformed workers’ state, i.e., a state which integrates significant market mechanisms into an essentially state-run planned economy, bureaucratically administered by the Chinese Stalinists atop the CCP. Russia, on the other hand, is an imperialist power, albeit relatively weak economically, though strong militarily. Despite the important difference in the class nature of these states, the US now considers both China and Russia as what the military call “near-peer” rivals.
Foreign policy planners for American imperialism would ideally like to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow, and “sequence” the China and Russia threats, i.e., deal decisively with Russia first before a full-scale “Pivot to Asia.” In order for Washington to move military forces out of Europe and the Middle East to focus them in East Asia, where they can concentrate on containing China and overturn the remaining gains of the 1949 Revolution, it needs stability, which it has of course not had.
The US is not only deeply entangled in Europe with the war in Ukraine, and losing to Russia, but is now facing the prospect of once again being pinned down in the Middle East. Both conflicts create a growing risk that the US and NATO will end up in direct confrontation with Russia and its allies. Instead of splitting apart the China-Russia alliance, America’s rapaciousness has driven Russia and China, along with Iran and North Korea, closer together.
This is the geopolitical landscape the next president of the United States faces when they take office on 20 January.
Kamala Harris is the preferred candidate of Wall Street and corporate America, and has the backing of the majority of US billionaires. She has the support of the military-industrial complex and “deep state” intelligence agencies (e.g., NSA, CIA and FBI). A number of prominent Republicans have broken party loyalty and openly endorsed Harris, including Liz Cheney, who at one point was the third highest-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. Wide layers of the existing leadership of the American labor movement are also rallying behind the Democrats.
Harris’s campaign, which has sought to distance itself somewhat from President Joe Biden (whom it views as a political liability), nonetheless represents a continuation of the Biden administration’s approach to managing American imperialism. When recently asked on the daytime talk show The View what she would have done differently than Biden during his presidency, Harris answered: “not a thing”.
Like Biden, Harris seeks to strengthen the Washington-based “multilateral” institutions underpinning the “rules-based order” created by the US after WWII (e.g., the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank). She is a strong supporter of NATO and the US-led military alliances which aim to counter China in the Indo-Pacific: the “Quad” (US, Australia, Japan and India) and AUKUS (Australia, UK and US). In her speech accepting the Democratic Party's nomination for president, she boasted: “As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”.
Trump of course is a vulgar misogynist and xenophobic bigot whose political antics appeal to tens of millions of angry Americans duped by his MAGA rhetoric. He also has support among the billionaire class, loathsome celebrities and layers of the establishment who prefer his “America First” strategy to stem US imperialism’s declining status as global hegemon.
His campaign features reactionary calls for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants; promises to “shut down Biden’s border disaster”; a “made in America tax rate” lowering the corporate tax rate to 15 percent for domestic production while slapping a 60 percent tariff on goods from China; plans to reverse climate policies and increase oil and gas production in the US, summed up with his mantra “drill, baby, drill”; and threats to use the power of the federal government, including the military, to go after what he calls the “enemy from within,” which apparently includes: “The crazy lunatics that we have—the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country” (Associated Press, 26 October 2024).
If Harris and the Democrats represent that faction of the American ruling class preferring to “stay the course” long pursued by previous generations of Republican and Democratic administrations, with a “progressive” liberal veneer, then Trump speaks for that wing of the bourgeoisie willing to overhaul the liberal international order the United States helped build in the 20th century. Needless to say, neither Harris nor Trump represent anything even close to the political interests of the vast majority of Americans (i.e., the working class), and the election of either will not resolve any of the key issues working people face (e.g., housing, health care, employment, cost of living).
Ultimately, regardless of the outcome of the election, whether a Democrat or Republican occupies the White House, all wings of the American bourgeoisie are firmly committed to pursuing class warfare at home and imperial conquest abroad. At most, they differ over how best to administer a US Empire in decline. Class-conscious workers should reject both candidacies and spoil their ballot.
One of the central foreign policy issues facing the next president will be managing Washington’s relationship with Tel Aviv and dealing with the crisis in the Middle East.
Israel is an apartheid state enforcing Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Its assault on Lebanon and genocide in Gaza are designed to dominate the region and complete the Zionist project established in 1948, i.e., consolidate a Greater Israel in the Middle East, in the process ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank and annexing large swathes of territory. Tel Aviv saw the events of 7 October last year as a unique opportunity to achieve that goal. And the Israeli state, backed by Western imperialism, views Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which includes Hamas, Hezbollah, Shia militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen, as a key obstacle.
Israel has only been able to carry out its murderous rampage because of the special relationship with, and strategic support of, American imperialism, attributable, at least in part, to the powerful Israel lobby in the US. In return, Israel furthers US geopolitical interests in the oil-rich Middle East by acting as its chief gendarme in the region. The United States provides approximately $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel every year to help maintain its “qualitative military edge,” i.e., to defeat conventional military threats from any individual state, coalition of states or non-state actors. Since the beginning of the war on Gaza, the Biden-Harris administration has provided an additional $8.7 billion in military aid, much of which is reportedly concealed from congressional oversight.
Despite this, Israel has so far not been able to achieve its primary goal of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. It has therefore sought to recklessly escalate events in an attempt to spark a regional war and draw in the US. It hopes this will deal a blow to Iran and its allies, provide the pretext for mass population transfers of the Palestinian people, and allow for a significant redrawing of national boundaries to create a Greater Israel. While Washington is nervous about Tel Aviv escalating events, destabilizing the region and provoking Iran, the US cares nothing about the Palestinians and is firmly committed to defending Israel.
Given the strategic importance of the Middle East to energy production and the global economy, all wings of the US ruling class are deeply committed to dominating the region and maintaining their Israeli client.
Harris has fully backed “Genocide Joe’s” basic approach to Israel, and there is absolutely no indication that as president she would do anything differently. She is a staunch supporter of Israel and in her acceptance speech vowed to “always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” And it was Biden and Harris who gave the greenlight to the vicious police assaults on Palestine solidarity encampments on university and college campuses across the United States earlier this year.
The Trump campaign’s approach to the Middle East has been defined by strong support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, a confrontational stance toward Iran, and rejection of a separate Palestinian state. While campaigning last month Trump had the audacity to praise “Bibi’s” genocidal war against Gaza as “moving along pretty good,” and claimed Biden was “trying to hold him [Netanyahu] back and he probably should be doing the opposite” (New York Post, 18 October 2024). Elsewhere he reportedly told Netanyahu “do what you have to do” (BBC, 31 October 2024).
Unsurprisingly, during Trump’s presidency he gave Israel everything it wanted: he provocatively recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the US embassy there from Tel Aviv; he withdrew the US from the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal); he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the illegally annexed Golan Heights and crafted the self-styled “Deal of the Century” plan which openly endorsed the Zionist political project of establishing a Greater Israel in the Middle East. Under Trump, the US engineered the “Abraham Accords,” which fostered diplomatic relations between Israel and key Arab allies in the region while completely sidelining the Palestinians.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has intensified its psychotic murder spree, American imperialism has only increased its support. Aside from the additional monetary assistance, this includes deploying aircraft carrier strike groups, cruise missile submarines, destroyers and an array of fighter jets and attack squadrons to bolster America’s 40,000 troops already in the region. In April and October, the US coordinated with the Israeli war machine in helping shoot down Iranian missiles bound for Israel. Last month, the Biden administration announced it was sending Israel its advanced Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system, along with 100 US soldiers to operate it, in what may prefigure a direct US-Israeli strike on Iran with potentially catastrophic consequences.
If such an attack were to take place, Marxists would side militarily with Iran (and any other neocolony under imperialist attack) and call for the defeat of the imperialists and their Israeli allies. We demand the imperialists be entirely driven out of the Middle East.
A regional conflict in the Middle East could easily grow into a larger war by dragging in not only the US, but Russia. Israel’s strikes on 26 October targeted sites in Iran, Iraq and Syria. Washington, which has 2,500 troops in Iraq and another 1,000 in Syria, already hit Iranian “proxies” with airstrikes in Iraq and Syria earlier this year. Moscow has warned Israel about attacking Iranian nuclear sites, and given Russia’s presence in Syria, it is difficult to predict how Moscow might react to a regional war with US boots on the ground.
Perhaps even more likely to trigger World War III is the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine between NATO-Western imperialist powers and Russia.
That conflict originates in repeated provocations and encirclement of Russia by NATO since the end of the Cold War. This includes the overthrow of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich in 2014 and the establishment of an ultra-nationalist government in Kiev, as the West sought to rip Ukraine out of Moscow’s “sphere of influence.” Kiev’s threats to retake Crimea and its attacks on the Donbas finally prompted Russia’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine in February 2022.
Since then, Ukraine has received approximately $275 billion in aid from the West. This includes at least $75 billion from the US under Biden and Harris, with another $100 billion on its way, the bulk of which is military-related, including ammunition and weapons, combat drones, battle tanks, fighter jets, air defense and anti-aircraft missiles, as well as “Made in the USA” cluster bombs, which are banned by over 100 countries for their indiscriminate killing of civilians.
The military-industrial complex essentially views the Ukraine war not as a potential existential threat to humanity, but as an extremely profitable business venture for “rolling out weapons.” Much of Washington’s aid to Kiev is simply designed to be reinvested in the US to benefit defense contractors and financial parasites on Wall Street. The American-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of the world's pre-eminent think tanks on foreign policy issues, sees US support for Ukraine as “the most significant and transformational opportunity to strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) since the end of World War II,” resulting in a “massive influx of funds into the DIB” (csis.org, 18 April 2024). Since February 2022, US and European defense contractors, many of which provide Ukraine with weapons, have seen record earnings and soaring profits. The scaling up of the defense industrial base of the Western imperialist powers is largely driven by great power competition and meant to place them on a wartime footing with Russia and China. It is part of a broader trend that has seen global defense spending rise 9 percent last year to a record $2.2 trillion. This is a clear presage of WWIII.
Of course, the catastrophic costs of the Ukraine conflict will not appear on the financial spreadsheets of those defense contractors profiting from the war, e.g., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Rheinmetall, etc. Instead, it will be ordinary Ukrainians and Russians that will pay the heaviest price for NATO’s proxy war. The number of those killed or injured since the war began now surpasses 1 million. And over 10 million Ukrainians have been forcibly displaced because of the war, 6 million of whom have fled the country. In the US and Ukraine’s other imperialist sponsors, the working class will also pay for the cost of financing the war in the form of austerity and cuts to social programs, healthcare, education, infrastructure, etc.
Kamala Harris has fully endorsed Biden’s efforts to arm and fund Ukraine. At the onset of the war in early 2022, she traveled to Europe to help shore up international support for Kiev and the war effort. She continues to back the sanctions against Russia, proclaims “unwavering” support to Kiev, and promises she “will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war” (The Hill, 28 October 2024).
Trump claims the Ukraine war would never have happened if he were president, and that if reelected, he would stop it within 24 hours. He has cynically sought to portray himself as the “peace” candidate, and on his social-media platform Truth Social (21 October 2024) incredulously wrote: “For our Country’s sake, and for your kids, Vote Trump for PEACE!” He has long been critical of support for Ukraine, has refused to commit to boosting military aid to the country if reelected, and wants European countries to step up contributions to Ukraine’s defense.
During his successful 2016 presidential run, Trump campaigned on similar themes. He pledged to improve relations with Russia and Putin and draw down American forces in Europe. None of this happened. Instead, he not only kept the Obama-era sanctions against Russia in place, but expanded them. He withdrew the United States from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that eliminated American and Russian stocks of intermediate- and short-range missiles. It was the Trump administration that adopted the National Security Strategy proclaiming a “return to great power competition” with China and Russia. And it was under Trump that Washington first began arming Ukraine in 2017.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, the US military-industrial complex and deep state bureaucracy were able to effectively control his administration’s foreign policy. Nonetheless, they were alarmed by Trump’s unpredictability, criticism of NATO’s utility and supposed conciliatory attitude towards Russia. They worry that if Ukraine goes under, and the West cuts and runs, irreparable damage will be done to US credibility, especially in the eyes of rivals Russia and China. Their reluctance to consolidate around the Trump-led Republicans in favor of the Democrats reflects an attempt to maintain control of the key security-intelligence posts and effectively guide US foreign policy towards what they view are American imperialism’s strategic geopolitical interests. They want to make it clear to Trump that his talk about “peace,” his threats to pull out of NATO and his promises to “end these endless wars” and “clean up of the military industrial complex to stop the war profiteering” is unacceptable. The recent campaign to label Trump a “fascist” by these same elements (e.g., retired Generals John Kelly and Mark Milley), which was embraced by Harris, the Democrats and the corporate media, is an effort to once again undermine him, and, if reelected, clearly limit his foreign policy options.
Putin has made it unequivocally clear that the two conditions necessary to start peace negotiations for the war in Ukraine are: 1. that Ukraine must formally declare it will not become a NATO member; and 2. that Kiev and the West have to accept Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territories (i.e., the four oblasts and Crimea).
Last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented his so-called “Victory Plan” to end the war, key elements of which include a formal invitation to join NATO and a refusal to cede any Ukrainian territory to Russia. In addition, he wants permission to use long-range, Western-supplied missiles deep into Russia territory and support for Kiev’s current military operation on Russian territory in the Kursk region. Upon hearing the plan, the Kremlin reportedly advised Zelensky to “sober up.” Both Harris and Trump are also unwilling to accept Putin’s conditions.
The possibility of the war in Ukraine escalating into a direct military conflict between Western imperialist forces and Russia is very real. In September, Putin announced that Russia was updating its nuclear doctrine, including lowering the threshold for a nuclear strike while also increasing the ambiguity about when nuclear weapons could be used. Russia’s “expanded” nuclear doctrine is clearly targeted at NATO members arming Ukraine in the ongoing war.
If such a conflagration was to break out, whether with conventional or nuclear weapons, Marxists would call for the defeat of all imperialist powers and, as is the case with Ukraine today, their proxies. For revolutionary socialists here in the West, our main task is to politically oppose our “own” imperialist ruling class and emphasize the struggle for the defeat of the NATO imperialists, just as Marxists in Russia would emphasize opposition to the Russian ruling class. In the immortal words of the great German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht during World War I: “the main enemy is at home!”
Marxists fight to break the political stranglehold of the Democrats and Republicans by seeking to build a mass revolutionary workers’ party—a party pursuing the interests of the working class, not the financial elites and billionaire class. Such a party must be built in the everyday struggles and mass organizations of working people, most importantly the trade unions. This requires a political struggle within the workers’ movement against the trade-union bureaucracy, social democrats and pseudo-socialists of various stripes that seek to tie organized labor to the Democratic Party (or, in some cases, the Republican Party).
Despite our small size, the IBT has attempted to intervene to provide a socialist strategy to end imperialism and war wherever possible. In addition to attending many of the major anti-war and pro-Palestinian protests, we have helped build and participated in united-front protests with other groups against the war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza and defending pro-Palestinian activists targeted by state repression here in the West. We have also spoken on trade-union sponsored panel discussions on both Ukraine and Palestine. We see these as important opportunities to work together with other socialists, trade-unionists and anti-war activists in concrete ways, while always providing a revolutionary perspective on ending imperialism and war, and pushing for the organized workers’ movement to adopt the necessary class-struggle tactics.
Key to averting World War III and ending the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza is unleashing the social power of the international working class, especially its organized components. In the West, unions in a number of imperialist countries have already carried out labor actions that disrupt the war machine, including in Australia, Britain and France. Transport unions in Belgium and dockers in Spain have declared their refusal to handle military equipment being sent to Israel. In October, dozens of Greek dockworkers blocked the loading of a container of ammunition destined for Israel in protest against the Gaza war.
Opposition to the war must include at least some section of the Israeli working class. And there are glimmers of hope, despite the current stranglehold of Zionism over Israeli workers. Just last week, Jewish Israeli activists held an anti-war protest in Tel Aviv calling on Israel to end the genocide, get out of Gaza and stop its assault on Lebanon. Actions such as these provide opportunities in which revolutionaries can intervene on the ground to actively defend the Palestinians and defeat the IDF war machine.
Class-struggle militants inside the labor movement must find ways to link opposition to imperialist war and defense of the Palestinians to a revolutionary program that addresses the many issues working people face (e.g., housing, medical and childcare, employment, income, cost of living), all the while pointing to the need for workers’ power and the socialist transformation of society. The need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism through a working-class revolution has never been more urgent. Ultimately, this is the only way to end war, oppression and poverty once and for all.
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