The National Defence Strategic Review, released in 2023 by the federal government, notes “only a remote possibility of any power contemplating an invasion” of Australia. This is the federal government’s official position, formulated by, among others, Army Major General Richard Vagg and Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, a former head of the armed forces. 
It is astounding, then, that the Greens have launched <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/4-billion-sovereign-defence-capacity">a policy to develop Australia’s military-industrial base</a>, which would allocate $4 billion to “sovereign manufacturing capabilities” of drones and missiles, purportedly to “defend” Australia. When not even the military can outline a plausible scenario in which a foreign invasion threatens this continent, why are the Greens suddenly positioning themselves as defenders of the realm against an undefined enemy? 
Australian governments have a history of lying and fearmongering about national security threats. But they usually at least provide scenarios or statements capable of being critically evaluated, such as, “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”. The Greens don’t offer even this level of phantom to critique.
Last year’s National Defence Strategy, which outlines the Defence Department’s evaluation of “security risks”, didn’t even mention the possibility of an invasion of Australia. But it did discuss the need for a military “more capable of the impactful projection” of power and for “a sovereign defence industrial base” to manufacture weapons and drones, among other things, to aid this “force projection” (otherwise known as invasion and interference operations in the Pacific and Southeast Asia). 
The Greens’ brains trust says its proposed military-industrial base reinvigoration will be used “for strictly defensive purposes only”—presumably unlike the similar-sounding military-industrial base the war hawks at Defence have proposed. Are the Greens really so naïve as to think that increased domestic military production capacity will not be used for force projection—the bread and butter of Australian statecraft since Federation? What will their next policy announcement be? A program to rebuild Australia’s derelict pubs “for purposes strictly related to sobriety”?
“We see this as the first step ... we don’t pretend this is the beginning and the end of the significant reorganisation required for Australia’s defence force”, Greens spokesperson David Shoebridge <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/4-billion-sovereign-defence-capacity">told ABC defence correspondent Andrew Greene</a> on the weekend. Greene noted that the party has never before released “a formally costed policy to fund new military programs”.
Responding to the announcement, Euan Graham, a director at the hawkish and pro-US Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Sky News that the Greens’ “willingness to talk about increased defence spending and production” is a sign of “positive change” in the party.
Of course, it would be unfair to describe the Greens as a bunch of warmongers. The new policy, announced last Saturday, also calls to “decouple” the Australian armed forces from the US military and comes as the party <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/end-aukus">urges the federal government to withdraw from the AUKUS pact</a>, a military and technology-sharing partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom through which Australia will obtain a suite of nuclear submarines. 
The Greens propose funding social programs from the savings gained by scrapping the pact—some $70 billion over ten years. Further, the party’s policies would likely reduce Australia’s military spending by perhaps half a trillion dollars over several decades. 
Scrapping AUKUS is a supportable policy. But it is not particularly progressive, nor all that controversial. Even former foreign minister Bob Carr, and former PMs Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull have rubbished the pact. Indeed, sections of the old Labor right were the first to criticise it. Yet the key issue in all this is not the precise locations from which Australia’s military sources its weaponry or the price it pays to obtain its hardware. 
The Greens’ shift comes as we enter <a href="https://redflagnewsletter.substack.com/p/note-5-europes-military-spending" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a period of global rearmament</a> in which two superpowers, China and the United States, are preparing for a confrontation. President Trump demands greater military spending by European members of the Western imperialist alliance and is shifting the US posture towards a range of states. 
In many cases, this has given militarism a new colour. Countries that fear losing Washington’s backing bow to Trump’s demands while selling the rearmament programs as some newfound independence. <a href="https://redflagnewsletter.substack.com/p/note-6-adam-tooze-and-the-liberal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">It’s progressive liberalism’s imperial revenge</a>: build the military to resist the far-right ogres in the White House and in the Kremlin. 
The Greens have tapped into this sentiment to sell their own policy shift. In this context, they are floating with the tide when every left-wing organisation ought to be swimming against the current. 
First, they float along with the liberal conceit that decoupling rearmament programs from “Donald Trump’s military” (as the Greens press release refers to US imperialism) is progressive or “independent”—as though the Australian ruling class is qualitatively different from others around the world. 
Second, they float along with the China panic by proposing a significant boost to “defensive” military-industrial capacity when, in reality, Australia’s military force posture and structure are being aggressively reconfigured for a confrontation with China. 
The Greens say they oppose military operations that “threaten our neighbours”. But the AUKUS pact, the renewed Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the United States, and Australia joining NATO as an “Indo-Pacific partner” are manifestations, rather than causes, of the underlying dynamic toward war in the western Pacific. While objectionable, these mini pacts are not the main thing. Nor is Donald Trump, the widespread distaste for whom the Greens are leveraging to build support for their military policy. 
Australia’s steadfast political alliance with the United States is far more important than its technical and logistical incorporation into US military planning. The alliance is foundational to Australia’s foreign affairs, not simply its defence policy. As such, the Greens’ talk about developing an “independent foreign policy” is risible when the party proposes little more than haggling around military procurement. So is the talk about “not threatening our neighbours”, which is a fantasy when Australia is a strategic base for and an unbending ally of US imperialism. <a href="https://greens.org.au/magazine/closepinegap-13-years-later">Former Senator Scott Ludlam understood this</a>. It’s not clear that David Shoebridge does—what’s his position on closing Pine Gap?
Without a commitment to breaking the US alliance in all its forms, expelling all US military forces from Australia, and dismantling all US intelligence-gathering installations, “peace”, “non-alignment”, “neighbourly respect” or other feel-good phrases are nothing but foreign policy bromides. Yet the Greens’ position is not to tear up the ANZUS treaty, considered the foundational document of the alliance, but to “renegotiate Australia’s position” within it.
Yet even a commitment to breaking the US alliance is not enough. Given the global dynamic, left-wing parties cannot settle for “detachment”. We have to fight against all manifestations of military aggression, whether they emanate from the new far-right aligned with Donald Trump or from the liberal alternatives. This is particularly true in imperialist countries such as Australia, which has joined criminal invasions or interfered in the domestic affairs of several countries in the region and beyond.
All this is too much for the Greens. Being tolerated as a “reasonable” party capable of forming government means accepting a range of capitalist non-negotiables, such as the state’s need for a competent military. “Self-defence” is the immediate argument to legitimise the new defence policy. But the party is probably also signalling that it should be considered a potential partner in the event of a hung parliament in the upcoming election.
To resist the new militarism and to prevent more war, we have to call bullshit on the rhetoric of “self-defence” used by governments to justify rocketing arms spending. And we have to build an international alliance of working-class and oppressed people—not an alliance of states and their rulers. On this front, the Greens’ new defence policy points in the wrong direction.

Ben Hillier

A criticism of the Greens’ defence policy

US President Donald Trump has thrown Ukraine to the wolves. After carrying out a brutal invasion for three years, during which a million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now being rewarded with a large slice of the country’s territory, while Trump is demanding a substantial stake of its resource wealth for the US.
This is imperial plunder at its finest: powerful countries ripping up a weaker one for their own benefit.
Commenting on the war in recent weeks, Trump has repeated his strange views on the world’s hierarchy of suffering. According to him, the main victim of the European slaughter is the US, because it has sent “hundreds of billions of dollars” in aid (like most of Trump’s comments, this is a gross exaggeration). The villain is Ukraine for continuing to resist Russian imperialism. And exhausted Russia, with its unfairly maligned dictator, deserves a break. 
This is Trump’s enduring view of international politics: poor little America has been ripped off by everyone. It is as unhinged as his ramblings about migrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio. 
The US spent the greater part of the last century invading other countries, overthrowing governments and exploiting half the globe through its multinational corporations. Now, Trump wants to amp it up by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, subsuming Canada and turning Gaza into a playground for US billionaires.
Putin, for his part, has sent the Russian military and mercenaries on bloody rampages through Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and West Africa, and shielded his fellow dictators from popular uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
It appears that everyone wants to play the victim now. The European powers and the United Kingdom say that Trump has abandoned them—that they have been left to fend for themselves in the noble task of protecting weaker countries. They say they must massively beef up their military spending to develop much bigger and much deadlier armed forces.
The European Commission has moved to allow €800 billion in additional borrowing by EU governments to “substantially increase” military spending. Germany’s incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to do “whatever it takes” to raise half a trillion euros for the military. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to cut the foreign aid budget to increase military spending. This is all on top of a 30 percent increase in EU member states’ spending on the military since 2021.
Their justification for military expansion is one of the more Orwellian pieces of capitalist propaganda: that more weapons equal more peace. In reality, they want only to defend and extend their own national interests in an increasingly unstable world.
The increased spending will come at an enormous cost to European and British workers, who have already endured waves of austerity over the last fifteen years. The money will have to come from somewhere, most likely health and social services that matter far less to the capitalists than lower taxes and subsidies for business. Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh put it plainly in an article titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”:
“The welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt. It was never designed for a world in which living to 100 is banal ... I have come to doubt whether rich, democratic societies can make difficult reforms—except in a crisis. Chronic discomfort isn’t enough. An element of real fear has to come in, as perhaps it has now.”
While workers get poorer, those at the top get richer from an expanding war machine. According to the US State Department, US weapons manufacturers and military contractors registered an unprecedented increase in sales last year. This made 2024 one of their most profitable years ever, thanks to the slaughters in Ukraine and Gaza and the military buildup around China. European weapons companies’ stocks have soared in the last week. 
There is much speculation about why Trump has sold out Ukraine. Some chalk it up to his erratic nature and admiration of dictators. While Trump does indeed seem to have an affinity for Putin (an authoritarianism to aspire to, perhaps), there’s an underlying imperialist logic to his actions—one that has nothing to do with peace. 
The biggest threat to US global supremacy is China, the world’s second-biggest economy, which has significantly modernised its military over the last decade and formed an alliance with Russia. The US has been trying to “pivot” its war machine to confront China for years; there’s just a disagreement among US elites over how exactly to do it. 
The Biden administration favoured strengthening multilateral international alliances, such as NATO, while building the military-industrial complex at home. 
Trump favours a more transactional approach—get the best deal with whatever country—which can mean extorting traditional allies. Some in the Trump administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, argue that the US should try to cleave Russia away from China, or at least weaken their alliance. In addition, Trump has grumbled for years that the US shoulders the economic burden of Western military alliances—he wants the Europeans to spend substantially more, rather than rely on a US security guarantee.
There has been much handwringing among global commentators about Trump’s approach, particularly about what it means for the “rules-based order”. In foreign policy speak, this refers to the post-World War Two set of rules administered through bodies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, which supposedly protect the sovereignty of individual countries, preserve peace and curb excessive uses of power. 
But one only has to look at the Vietnam War, successive invasions of the Middle East, Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and countless other atrocities to see that the “order” was an alliance of powerful countries, including the US, Europe, the UK, Japan, Australia and others, who used economic or military pressure to rig the world in their favour. 
The US’s allies and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media are upset that the rules are possibly being altered. But they’re all still playing the same dirty game: powerful countries ruling the world through shifting networks of alliances. 
The Trump administration also demands higher military spending from Australia, an increasingly important country for the US because of its location in Southeast Asia and willingness to host US military and spy bases. Eldridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for head of policy at the Defence Department, said last week that Australia needs to increase defence spending to 3 percent of GDP. Australia is already trekking in this direction, spending a record $56 billion, or 2 percent of GDP, this year. Treasury expects it to rise to 2.4 percent in 2027-28.
Many Australian commentators are beginning to urge the government to join the global military buildup. Take the Australian Financial Review’s Christopher Joye: 
“We have to be able to produce our own ballistic missiles with the ability to strike any place on the planet. We need independent nuclear power and the capacity to enrich weapons-grade uranium for strategic optionality. And we need scores of nuclear submarines ...”
The Labor government has steadfastly refused to criticise Trump in any way, even over Ukraine, for fear of pissing off the new president, in part fearing that the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal be put at risk. But that deal ought to immediately be scrapped. Writing at the Conversation last year, Australian National University visiting fellow Peter Martin noted:
“Australia’s decision to buy three nuclear-powered submarines and build another eight is so expensive that, for the $268 billion to $368 billion price tag, we could give a million dollars to every resident of Geelong, or Hobart, or Wollongong.”
The threat of a future global war seems so far away that many don’t take it seriously. The climate change and attacks on our living standards and the oppressed seem, and are, more immediate. But every new increase to a military budget, every new nuclear-powered submarine and every new speech about the threat of China takes us a step closer to that reality. 
The Ukrainian experience gives us a horrifying glimpse of what such a war might look like: the military tactics of old—protracted trench warfare in which millions of young soldiers are fed through the meat grinder—combined with cutting-edge technology such as kamikaze drones and AI-assisted cyber warfare. Not to mention that there are now enough nuclear weapons to obliterate all of humanity. Inside Russia, Putin has overseen an authoritarian crackdown to suppress any whiff of dissent to his invasion.
Workers and the oppressed worldwide have no interest in any of this—wars are the consequence of rivalries among the world’s ruling class spilling out into armed competition. Trump, Starmer, Merz and the rest are ramping up nationalist rhetoric to convince their populations to accept the economic burden of this remilitarisation drive. 
But you won’t ever see Elon Musk, Gina Rinehart, Donald Trump or Anthony Albanese on the battlefield—they make the rest of us fight on their behalf. Our world is run by monsters who will send millions to die if it means a bigger slice of the capitalist pie for themselves.
We have to build a socialist alternative to this never-ending nightmare of death and destruction. Unless we fight back, they will keep playing the same game of war and conquest, with us as their pawns.

Eleanor Morley

Resist the new militarism

Robert Narai

Trump and US imperialism—an interview with Joel Geier

Every day brings a new barrage of announcements by US President Donald Trump and billionaire bigot buddy Elon Musk. Working on the basis that, if they throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will stick, Trump and Musk are creating pandemonium in Washington, DC. 
But while all may seem to be chaos in the halls of power, there is a thread of logic behind it all. Trump is ripping up accepted political norms at home and the liberal world order abroad because, in his view, they have failed to secure American supremacy. Trump’s package of measures, taken together, constitutes a strategy to break America from its cycle of relative decline and come out on top.
Trump’s program is squarely aimed at China. China’s rise to world power status is an existential threat to US hegemony, and Trump's program is the latest attempt to hold China down and assert US global power.
US relations with China have undergone a series of twists and turns since 1949, when the Communist Party (CCP) defeated the US-backed Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in a bloody civil war. The US refused to recognise the new government and imposed a total financial and trade boycott. In the Cold War environment, where the USSR and US competed for world supremacy, Mao Zedong’s Communists, who looked to Moscow, were part of the enemy camp. 
In the Korean War, which started just months after the CCP took power, China and the United States came to blows. Following North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the US-backed regime in the South, the US sent hundreds of thousands of troops to prop up its client government and pushed North Korean forces back close to the border with China. Fearing a US invasion, China responded by dispatching the People’s Liberation Army to drive the Americans back. Before long, a stalemate had been reached. There followed two more years of inconclusive fighting before a ceasefire was declared in 1953, which is still in place today, a frozen conflict.
The Korean War did two things to China. It reinforced the country’s close relationship and, indeed, military dependency on the USSR, and it forced the CCP to transform the economy. In the first year or two of Communist rule, the government proceeded cautiously with economic reform and looked to the capitalists to rebuild the economy, which had been wrecked by years of war and foreign occupation. The immense economic strain imposed by the Korean War and the fact that war could resume on the Korean peninsula at any moment drove home to the CCP the need to drastically speed up the process of industrialisation for military purposes. Soviet-style central planning seemed the surest way to do so. Within the space of three years, the Communist government expropriated the capitalist class and replaced them with a bureaucratic Communist regime based on state capitalist lines, much as Stalin had done in Russia in 1929. Self-sufficiency and autarky were prioritised, and foreign trade and investment, except for Soviet aid, were reduced to a minimum. 
China’s close relationship with the USSR lasted only a few years. Mao’s Communists grew to resent what they regarded as overbearing Soviet interventions and were suspicious of its overtures to the US after Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956. In 1964, the two sides split, China declaring the Soviet Union a traitor to the cause of world communism. 
Just as the Korean War had consolidated one alignment of imperialist forces, the Vietnam War was the trigger for another. By the late 1960s, Washington had realised it was losing in Vietnam: it had the military firepower to destroy the country but could not crush the popular Vietnamese resistance. It was facing a growing anti-war movement at home, and US soldiers were mutinous. The US wanted to get its ground troops out. For its part, China, which backed the North Vietnamese government, was looking to break out of its diplomatic isolation. Such was its enmity with Moscow that reconciliation with the USSR was not an option. Vietnam peace talks, which started in Paris in 1968, provided the backdrop for a rapprochement between the US and China based on their common hostility to the USSR. In 1972, US President Richard Nixon visited Beijing, and a new imperialist era was born. Formal diplomatic relations between the US and China were restored seven years later.
China may have broken from its isolation, but it was still desperately poor. In the early 1980s, the Chinese government began steadily to relax state control over its economy to stimulate growth. The process advanced in fits and starts. Inflation and growing economic inequality associated with market reforms sparked widespread discontent, which erupted in 1989, known best for the massive student protest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing but which also involved numerous worker protests in several cities. 
The CCP’s response to Tiananmen Square and its need to increase foreign investment to finance development was twofold: one, an energetic opening to foreign trade and investment and, two, the ratcheting up of political repression to block direct challenges to Communist rule and prevent workers from organising to push up wages. Foreign investment by Chinese diaspora businesses began to flood in to take advantage of tax breaks and cheap land and labour, initially to produce low-end textiles and household goods. 
Starting soon after economic reopening, the Chinese government also shut many of the country’s state-owned enterprises—those in declining industries and unlikely ever to make a return on investment. Tens of millions of workers lost their jobs in the north of the country, while tens of millions more from rural areas headed to seaboard cities in the south, where they filled the production lines of the new factories, having none of the rights of the existing urban workforce. Before long, Western investors had joined their Asian peers in heading for China.
The 1990s and 2000s were the heyday of collaboration between US and Chinese capital and governments. US businesses shifted low-end production to China in search of big profits and new export markets. Even where industry remained in the US, the entry of hundreds of millions of low-paid Chinese workers into the world labour market helped US capitalists keep wages down. For its part, the Chinese government got Western investment, R&amp;D, know-how and access to wealthy markets. Both benefited when China used its rapidly growing foreign exchange reserves to buy US government bonds, enabling the US to finance its government debt at low interest rates.
China rose from a marginal economic player, less than 2 percent of world economy in 1979, to become the number two economic power when it superseded Japan and Germany in 2010.
There were certainly tensions in the relationship with the US. In 1999, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as part of its war with Serbia. The US “war on terror” in Afghanistan in the early 2000s was aimed, at least in part, at preventing China’s growing influence in Central Asia. Each side needled the other about their respective domestic political regimes. Business owners on each side told of industrial sabotage, theft of intellectual property, unfair government subsidies, legal systems stacked in favour of the other side and so on. Nonetheless, the US believed it could incorporate China within the US-dominated world economy and, on that basis, sponsored China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
China’s rise to number two economic power was celebrated by many Western ideologists, both the right and some formerly of the left. They said China’s economic miracle was proof that capitalist “free markets” trumped socialist central planning, an argument given greater force by the collapse of the USSR in 1991. However, the pleasure they took from China’s growing integration into the US-superintended world economic system soon turned sour as China began to use its new-found economic prowess to challenge the US. 
Starting in the 2010s, alarm bells about China’s growing threat to the US began to ring in Washington. Chinese companies were now marching into markets in Central and Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia that the US once regarded as its exclusive domain. China was now using loans to entice formerly Western-aligned nations closer to it. China was no longer restricted to low-end household goods but was now using its growing pool of skilled engineers to design and manufacture high-end, technology-intensive products matching US and European standards. With Western economies advancing only sluggishly after the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s rapid rebound and annual growth of up to 12 percent only highlighted the US’s relative decline. The country that the US had helped grow to world status was now coming back to bite it.
Just as threatening to the US were China’s moves to use its economic and technological advancement to build a military force capable of pushing the US out of the South China Sea, a region the US had dominated since the Pacific War, and which was now the most dynamic in the world. China has built a navy and a fleet of sophisticated jet fighters capable of reaching far from its shores. It is establishing military outposts on shoals and islets in the South China Sea. It is carrying out flyovers and naval missions close to Taiwan’s shores to forestall any moves by Taiwan to independence and to prepare to blockade or invade the island at some point. China has developed missiles capable of sinking US aircraft carriers. While China lacks the deep and broad relations the US enjoys with many nations in the Asia Pacific, the CCP is trying to remedy its soft power deficit through increased financial, trade and military ties with island nations in the south and south-west Pacific, seeking to edge out traditional relations with the US and its allies, including Australia. 
The US maintains a military lead over China, but the global nature of its imperial interests is also a weakness. It may outspend China on its military by nearly three to one, but its forces are stretched across several continents. Chinese imperialism, by contrast, is focused on domination closer to home in the South China Sea. The US’s difficulties in supplying Ukraine with war materiel in its war with Russia indicate problems in its defence industrial capacity at home. Much US military spending is wasted on weapons systems that are already obsolete by the time they roll off the production line. Long-term offshoring of production of vital components for the war machine, including to China itself, has become a big concern for the Pentagon.
China’s challenge to US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific has dominated US foreign and defence policy for 15 years, from presidents Barack Obama to Joe Biden. It lies at the heart of successive US national security and national defence policy documents. It explains Obama’s 2012 call for a “pivot to Asia” whereby 60 percent of the US Navy would be deployed to the Asia-Pacific. It underpinned Biden’s bid to build alliances to defend the so-called international rules-based order threatened by the “autocracies” of China and Russia. It helps explain growing US military spending and its withdrawal from the Middle East following the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. 
“Make America Great Again” is a program to prepare the US to fight and win a war with China. It is not only that; there are plenty of right-wing causes to be pursued, such as hostility to vaccinations, that do not have a direct or necessary military connection, but the overall direction is clear. 
Most obviously, there are tariffs and other incentives to encourage US companies to shut down industrial and IT production in China or areas such as Taiwan that are vulnerable to China and bring it home. Such a move would normally be financially unsustainable for many US companies since the cost of doing business is so much higher in the US. Trump’s solution is to try to slash the cost of doing business in the US, with the working class paying the price. What may simply look like gifts to his business mates, such as big corporate tax cuts, the savaging of the IRS, deregulation of environmental and labour provisions, the dismantling of the National Labor Relations Board and the invitation to fossil fuel companies to “drill, baby, drill”, are all aimed at incentivising US companies to rebuild the US’s industrial base.
Preparing for war is not just a matter of military hardware. It also involves rallying the population. This explains Trump’s ideological offensive against “woke”, DEI, trans rights and “cultural Marxism”. In their place, Trump and his cabinet want a patriotic population that evinces a willingness to fight and die for the country. They admire Israel with its highly militarised society and a big majority of the Jewish population fanatically devoted to wiping out the Palestinians. They want, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it, “to revive the warrior ethos”. If successful, this will have the added benefit of breaking political opposition at home and intimidating the working class, making easier the job of driving down wages and conditions and sacking workers.
Imperialist competition forces the contending powers to begin to mirror each other. So, in both the US and China, we see a repressive and reactionary government, the purging of dissent within and without the state machine, an incessant propaganda effort dedicated to fostering patriotism and “traditional values” and the diversion of funds from civilian to military use.
Trump and his loyal appointees in the state apparatus probably understand the opportunity that now lies open. It is not just Trump’s shock and awe tactics, the disarray in the ranks of his liberal opponents, his domination of the Republican Party, his control over both houses of Congress and the support of a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. The broader geopolitical situation also favours his initiatives to re-establish US power. US imperialism is currently enjoying some respite from its relative decline in the past two decades. In the Middle East, the US’s chief ally, Israel, has enjoyed a string of victories over Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Iran has been further weakened by the fall of longstanding ally Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. 
In Europe, the cards are also falling the US’s way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s economic stagnation have highlighted Europe’s dependence on the US. Trump is now seeking to exploit this as he opens closer relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and tells his NATO European allies to fend for themselves. If this comes to pass, the US will be free to redeploy some of its extensive military assets currently based in Europe to the Asia Pacific, where China continues to increase its imperialist presence.
Then there is the changing political alignment in Europe. Members of the hard right who identify with Trump are on the rise, while the centrist parties that long championed the so-called liberal world order are suffering serious electoral losses and, in some cases, forming blocs with the Trumpian hard right.
And finally, there is the US’s emergence as one of the world’s largest energy exporters, a position it can use as leverage against friends and foes alike.
This, then, is Trump’s project in its essentials. It is important to note, however, that it may not succeed. His coalition of supporters and financiers comprises various forces that do not all see eye to eye. The component parts of MAGA are unpopular among broad swathes of the population, and the president faces mid-term elections in November next year that may result in him losing his double majority in Congress—that is, if he is not stopped by a popular backlash in the workplaces and streets before then. Important sections of the capitalist class are suspending judgement on the program, particularly the attempt to unwind global flows of capital and trade. Growing interest repayments on government debt weigh on the budget, sticky inflation limits the Fed’s ability to cut interest rates, and a full-blown trade war could seriously damage the US economy. Nonetheless, this is the direction of travel in which Trump and his allies wish to take the country, and whatever reservations some capitalists and senior functionaries in the military and public service may have, they share with Trump a belief that the status quo is not working and things must change.
None of this is to say that war with China is about to break out. Both sides understand they are currently not prepared for one. But history has shown that the most dangerous times are those when a rising power challenges the hitherto dominant power. The last time a dominant global power—Britain—faltered, the instability and rivalry resulted in two world wars and fascism in Europe. This is hardly a prospect that should give us any comfort.

Tom Bramble

Behind the chaos, Trump prepares to take on China

US President Donald Trump has reduced the Western establishment’s liberal imperialist wing to a blubbering heap. 
Even before the White House humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski, the Atlantic magazine was warning about “The End of the Postwar World” and the crumbling of the system of alliances “allowing democratic societies ... to prosper”. A teary-eyed Christoph Heusgen, long-time German diplomat and chair of the annual Munich Security Conference, bewailed Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech to the event last month as a “European nightmare” in the context of Trump’s proposals to end the war in Ukraine. 
The administration’s plan for Russian annexations and American plunder of mineral resources is undoubtedly abhorrent. <a href="https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/02/21/poll-%E2%85%94-of-ukrainians-back-zelenskyy-majority-rejects-us-russia-talks-and-no-guarantees-ceasefire/">According to Rating Group</a>, a Ukrainian pollster, only 1 percent of Ukrainians support accepting Russian conditions to end the war. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin plan to carve up Ukraine against the will of its population, normalise expansionist imperialism and trample the right to national self-determination.
But the waterworks from Europe’s ruling classes have nothing to do with genuine concern for human rights. The first rumblings of official unease with Trump did not come in response to his mass expulsion idea for Gaza, his plans for mass deportations of migrants in the US or his collaboration with the Hitler-saluting Elon Musk. 
Moreover, British and American leaders happily supported Russian barbarism in the contested region of Chechnya when that suited their interests. Western backing for Ukraine against Russia was always about strengthening ties between US and European imperialism—but now, Europe’s leaders are increasingly anxious about their own position within the existing imperialist hierarchy. 
The Munich Security Conference exemplifies the favoured branding of post-war capitalism known as the “liberal rules-based order”. We should shed no tears for an order that brought us the invasion of Iraq and the genocide in Gaza. The West’s professed love for democracy hasn’t stopped its flirtations with dictators from Pinochet to bin Salman. And despite all that they preached about the Second World War being fought against Hitler and fascism, the Allies stood aside as General Franco imposed a military junta on Spain, and they assisted Nazi collaborators in Greece. 
Assembled at Munich were the remaining dregs of the European political establishment not already overrun by a new, 21st-century wave of far-right forces. They covet American military protection from their aggressive Russian neighbour. Since 1945, their alliance has functioned under the guise of “shared democratic values”. But all that waffle was underpinned by the “percentages agreement” between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, dividing Europe into spheres of influence without the slightest regard for the opinions of the people to be ruled by one or the other of the imperialist blocs.
Vance’s speech made it clear that Washington will no longer operate within the post-WWII ideological framework. The second Trump administration intends to bolster illiberal far-right parties and authoritarian regimes across the Atlantic. “[What] I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia”, Vance teased. “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its ... values shared with the United States of America.”
Vance charged that “across Europe, free speech ... is in retreat”, citing a few examples when police have prosecuted “anti-feminist” and Islamophobic activists. The reality, of course, is that far-right provocateurs and activists are ascendant, catapulted forward by the ever-deepening chauvinism of establishment capitalist politics. What upset the audience at Munich was that Vance turned capitalist sanctimony about “freedom” and “democracy” on its head.
Vance’s message was that more governments should follow Trump’s lead and discard the liberal rhetoric they regularly use to legitimise their rule. Vance quipped that “there’s a new sheriff in town”, and he wants to bring the system’s most brutish dynamics out into the open. He hailed a recent move by German conservatives to work with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on border controls. “There is no room for firewalls”, Vance insisted, referring to entrenched German parliamentary taboos against collaborating with fascists.
The new administration in Washington wants fewer restrictions on fascist organising and more alliances between traditional conservatives and the electoral far right. After all, Make America Great Again began as a project inside one of the main parties of US capitalism and now counts Hitler-saluting adherents among its key personnel. 
The pro-Russia sentiment in Vance’s polemic poured salt on the wounds, and not just because Putin is a traditional enemy of European states. The war in Ukraine has become a rallying point for the far right over the past three years precisely because of the ideological narratives constructed around it by the liberal establishment. 
Biden and NATO cynically presented the conflict as a war between the “democratic” West and authoritarian Russia. In this clash of civilisations, the far right unsurprisingly chose to side with Moscow’s openly authoritarian regime. For many European far-right parties, as well as for many US Republicans, Putin’s ultraconservative strongman style is a model for pushing back liberal social attitudes.
Trump’s punitive approach to Ukraine and his warmth towards Putin reflect political sympathies for the Russian despot. And Vance’s references to Russia made clear that America is on the side of the European far right, not the European establishment. As the vice president departed to meet AfD leader Alice Weidel, he left the assemblage of ruling class representatives in Munich grieving. “We have to fear,” said Heusgen, “that our common value base is not that common anymore”. 
The values of status quo capitalism deserve no lamentation. But Trump and his supporters are determined to usher in a new order of fascistic brutality and open imperialist aggression. In foreign policy and when it comes to civil liberties in the West, Trump’s administration wants a world in which might makes right. 
Faced with a new far-right onslaught, we cannot rely on the snivelling hypocrites currently grumbling about Ukraine. They created the order out of which fascism and authoritarianism have again reared their monstrous heads.

Ruby Healer

Crocodile tears for Ukraine won’t stop the far right

US President Donald Trump has declared his intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population. Trump outlined his genocidal vision during a grotesque press conference, standing alongside a smirking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has overseen the massacre of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, and who has an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued against him for war crimes.
Trump justified his calls for the annihilation of the Palestinian people from their homeland by describing the complete devastation that has been wrought on Gaza—devastation caused by the man grinning next to him, and by the US itself which has supplied Israel with the weaponry to destroy Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools and all other civilian infrastructure.
As if ethnic cleansing wasn’t bad enough, Trump added his own billionaire-parasite twist, declaring that the US would “own” Gaza, and that he would turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace put it succinctly: “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago”. 
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has kept his knee bent before the hard-right US president by refusing to condemn these open calls for genocide. Albanese said he “would not give a daily commentary on statements by the US President”. Even spineless world leaders who have been lining up to kiss Trump’s arse, like the UK’s Keir Starmer, have at least verbally rebuked his calls for ethnic cleansing. Not so Albanese, who is setting new standards for pathetic capitulation to the far right. 
Trump’s open support for the total removal of Palestinians from Gaza puts much of the political and media establishment in Australia and around the world in a bit of a quandary. They continued to support Israel through sixteen months of its genocide in Gaza, no matter how many children were massacred. They have dehumanised the Palestinian people and engaged in an escalating campaign of slandering, sacking and repressing those who speak up for the Palestinians, from journalists and academics to students and protest organisers. But most of this has happened under the official pretence that Israel was “defending itself”, accompanied by weasel words from former US President Joe Biden and Albanese pretending that they wanted peace and a two-state solution, and a compliant media who presented this fairytale as though it were real. Netanyahu knows this game well; he knows that to get away with genocide it’s best to deny that is what you’re doing.
Trump has shattered that pretence. He has said out loud what has been Israel and the US’s policy all along, obvious to anyone who wanted to see, yet officially denied: wiping out the Palestinian people. That’s what the last sixteen months have been about, and the US and Australia have provided the arms to do it.
The media’s reaction has been mixed, reflecting this quandary of how to deal with a US president who makes it harder to justify the rotten system we live in. Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph ran an opinion piece titled “Can Trump’s plan to level Gaza finally bring peace?”. Pondering about whether genocide equals peace was a bridge too far for most, though, who have instead tried to reassure us that Trump’s statements are “outlandish” and unrealisable. 
But the genocide in Gaza is not outlandish. It has been happening. And Trump’s statements have effectively ripped up the ceasefire deal and given Netanyahu the green light to resume the slaughter in coming months. They must be stopped.

Josh Lees

Trump spells out plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza

Donald Trump and his far-right coterie have assumed the reins of the US government. 
But, arguably, the returning president’s most significant victory is that his far-right sensibilities seemingly have become an accepted part of the political furniture: hyper-nationalism, mass deportations, dramatic increases in fossil fuel exploitation, a war on women’s autonomy and transfers of wealth from workers to the already wealthy through tax cuts for billionaires and their companies. 
The New York tycoon wrote in his 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal that attention “creates value”. The adage has proven transferable. Politically, Trump generates outrage cycles to his advantage. Whatever the issue, at the end of the day—and often for weeks—Trump manages to get everyone talking about precisely what he wants talked about, thereby setting the tone and shaping the political narrative. 
Through his attention-seeking, and unlike anyone this century, he has shifted political consciousness to the right—at least in terms of redefining what tens of millions of people consider to be “acceptable” in a leader: narcissism, punching down at almost every opportunity, reheating canards previously the property of fringe fascism, finding scapegoats for every failure while claiming credit for other people’s efforts.
Yet the tectonic plates of global politics and economics are moving under the pressure of forces far greater than those generated by one obnoxious New York billionaire carrying out what some consider to be a hostile takeover of the US government.
Well before Trump arrived on the political scene, the capitalist class in the US and around the world had concentrated obscene amounts of wealth in its hands. Traditional “centre-left” and “centre-right” ruling parties’ public support had eroded. And the 21st century’s two great powers, China and the US, were marching towards confrontation. 
So Trump is perhaps better understood not simply as an individual but as the personification of four converging forces: his own vanity and self-absorption, an arrogant and exploitative US capitalist class, the resurgent and ultra-nationalist far right and a wounded yet increasingly paranoid and aggressive US imperialism.
“My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward”, Trump wrote in 1987. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
This quintessentially capitalist bullishness is one reason that Trump easily slots in at the apex of US power. But his vulgarity, brashness and scepticism of science are the perfect expressions of a world no longer capable of concealing the naked self-interest and a “might makes right” calculus of politics and geopolitics.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t bother with bromides about defending “freedom” or “democracy” abroad, which have been cornerstone talking points in US foreign policy for decades. Anti-China rhetoric had already retreated from philosophical and political “values” to legalistic appeals to “rules” and “order” in international commerce. 
However, with Trump, it’s just about winning or losing; the only rationale for winning being that doing anything else makes one a loser. Here, the “new” nationalism aligns with real imperial anxieties that question whether the US has what it takes to defeat China economically and militarily.
It would be easy to scoff at an incoming president who muses about turning Canada into a US state and refuses to rule out militarily annexing Greenland. Yet, despite their seeming outlandishness, such wild threats signal to Trump’s supporters and foes that “Make America Great Again” nationalism is a project for America’s international supremacy. Like the last, the new administration is attempting an economic reordering to fortify the foundations of a war economy. 
Politically, he and his team are also trying to create a populace that is more accepting of the indecencies and callousness required to prevail in a major conflict.
No-one is scoffing at Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda. Yet, while the immediate targets are millions of undocumented migrants, the spectacle of it all will matter just as much. The goal, already partly achieved according to opinion polls, is to normalise the idea that some people ought to have fewer rights than others and to win support for persecuting non-citizens. 
Should people learn to live in such an atmosphere and with abuses directed against their neighbours and workmates, the right-wing hope is that they will become inoculated against impulses to oppose the abuses resulting from a struggle for supremacy against a foreign country.
The war against women’s right to abortion and the campaign against trans people no doubt are led as much by “traditional” conservatives as by the new far right. Yet, similar to the deportation agenda, there is another goal. In this case, it’s reinforcing an “unfree” orthodoxy: subordination to a purportedly natural hierarchy and order. 
In fact, pick any agenda item of the new government—be it “drill, baby, drill”, the veneration of wealth accumulation, the war on “woke”, the return of machismo and so on. Whether new or aggressively recycled, each should be understood as part of an integrated agenda: increasing business profitability and prestige, reversing previous social, cultural and political advances, and bolstering US global supremacy.
The more this agenda is established, and the fewer freedoms oppressed people enjoy, the greater the disempowerment of the working class and the more likely it will drift with, or even embrace, the reactionary political winds.
The key question in the US over the next four years is whether enough people march against the storm.

Trump’s new era of reaction

Over the last year, we have obtained a clearer picture of what the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the UK and the US will mean for Western Australia. The first big announcement came in March—the federal government will <a href="https://www.defenceconnect.com.au/naval/11609-western-australia-to-house-upgraded-aukus-submarine-base">spend $8 billion to expand the HMAS Stirling naval base</a> on Garden Island so that it can dock Australia’s first nuclear-powered submarines from the early 2030s. It will also host regular rotations of US and UK nuclear-powered submarines.
The next major announcement came in July. HMAS Stirling, only five kilometres from the residential suburb of Rockingham, will be a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-19/nuclear-waste-facility-at-hmas-stirling-rockingham/104114228">dumping ground for radioactive waste</a> generated by the nuclear submarines. While the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) has made standard assurances of the planned facility’s safety, nearby residents have raised concerns. 
Speaking to the ABC, James Mumme, a local science teacher and Greens candidate, said: “I’m concerned about radiation leaks. Accidents, they do happen, and [there’s the] threat of Cockburn Sound being made a target and the 130,000 people who live in Rockingham being incinerated”. 
Another resident, adjunct professor of psychology George Burns, raised the potential for waste leakage to harm nearby species, explaining, “We have three endangered marine species in this area”. While ARPANSA received 165 submissions from a 30-day community consultation, it has not made them available to the public.
The most recent announcement was made in October. Henderson Shipyard, just a few kilometres from residential areas such as Beeliar, Hamilton Hill and the popular Coogee Beach, will become the location of a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-16/new-aukus-submarine-servicing-base-at-hmas-stirling/104478192">new AUKUS submarine servicing and shipbuilding precinct</a>. It will be the maintenance hub for the submarines and a manufacturing facility for Australian army landing craft and naval frigates. 
Of course, while workers are told to tighten their belts, there is plenty of funding to go around for the military. Defence Minister Richard Marles has not provided an exact cost for the hub’s development. But, according to the ABC, industry sources expect a range of between $12 billion and $20 billion. 
These are huge projects, and they will drastically shape WA’s economic and political landscape in a militarist direction. As Marles put it, “This represents the most significant defence industry offering to Western Australia since federation”. According to Premier Roger Cook, “This particular industry will rival the resources industry as one of our main areas for economic growth, for economic activity and for employment”. 
The argument most often cited in favour of these developments is “job creation”. But jobs can and should be created by investing in projects that meet social needs. How many jobs could be created if these billions of dollars were instead spent building schools, hospitals and social housing?
Another announcement made last year on the topic of housing was that 550 new homes will be built to house the US and UK soldiers involved in submarine visits. This is during a housing crisis in which Perth rentals have become among the most expensive in the country! It is an outrage that the government can suddenly build hundreds of new homes for US and UK soldiers, but not for the desperate people waiting on social housing lists. 
Western Australia is rapidly becoming a major military hub in the build-up to war between the US and China. Working-class people have nothing to gain from any of it. While WA politicians celebrate the federal cash splash, for the rest of us it is nuclear waste, dilapidating schools and overrun hospitals, never-ending social housing wait lists and the prospect of becoming a target in nuclear war.

Erin Russell

Western Australia’s south coast to become a major military hub

US President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed trade war, his proposals to increase military spending and the stacking of his cabinet with China hawks have made it clear that the US will continue preparing for war with China. Australia’s military alliance with the United States means that Canberra has practically signed up the country for such a war if it breaks out.
For the Australian political establishment, Trump’s election victory was an opportunity to express unwavering commitment to the US alliance. PM Anthony Albanese was one of the first world leaders to phone Trump and congratulate him on his election victory. Opposition leader Peter Dutton, who considers himself an Australian version of Trump, said the relationship with the US “will strengthen, and we will make sure that we work very closely with the incoming administration”.
The US alliance—and new agreements such as the AUKUS military pact between Australia, the US and the United Kingdom—have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/24/us-military-base-australia-china/">transformed</a>
Australia into a central <a href="https://youtu.be/a3HhPU9DGsQ?si=msq1o2NhLzPADK3x">base of operations</a>
for the <a href="https://youtu.be/CW1TYDVBSmI?si=iKjpIQ1cbsoksrgA">US military</a>
in recent years. 
Northern Australia is now routinely used by the US Marines and Air Force. The Tindal air base near Darwin has been expanded to accommodate nuclear-capable B-52 bombers. The construction of giant fuel storage tanks on Darwin’s RAAF base means that both now act as a stationing and refuelling point for US aircraft, enabling the US to conduct more flights to and from the NT.
Western Australia will soon host <a href="https://www.defence.gov.au/about/locations-property/infrastructure-projects/submarine-rotational-force-west-infrastructure-project#:~:text=Overview,West%20(SRF-West).">rotational deployments</a> of US nuclear submarines and a <a href="https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2024-10-16/new-defence-precinct-henderson-deliver-continuous-naval-shipbuilding-and-nuclear-powered-submarine-maintenance">naval industry</a> that WA Premier Roger Cook claims will rival the state’s massive resources sector.
The joint US-Australian “<a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/is-gweo-on-target/">guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise</a>” aims to transform Australia’s weapons manufacturing industry to produce large enough quantities of precision-guided missiles to support deployed US forces across the Indo-Pacific. Spy and communications bases—such as the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/pine-gap-australias-secret-and-deadly">Pine Gap</a> satellite surveillance facility near Alice Springs, which covers the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East—are vital elements of US strategic command, control, communications and satellite systems for launching attacks against China. Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles recently bragged that the US military is now operating in Australia across “all domains ... land, sea, air, cyber and space”.
What explains this slavish support for the US alliance—shared by Australia’s main political parties, the security establishment, business elites and mass media—no matter who occupies the White House?
The answer given by the political establishment is that the alliance protects the Australian population and deters threats from “our enemies”. Chief among these threats, we are told, is China. Yet the Australian government’s own strategic planning documents admit that an invasion of this island continent, by China or anyone else, remains a remote possibility. The risk of a Chinese attack on Australia arises only because Australia serves as a base for US military capabilities and because Australia’s own defence forces have pledged their commitment to joining a US war against China in the Indo-Pacific. 
Most critics of AUKUS and the US alliance answer that Australia is a puppet of the United States: our leaders are nothing but spineless dupes grovelling at the feet of US presidents. Proponents of this view—from the <a href="https://greens.org.au/platform/world">Greens</a> to former Labor PM <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/08/13/paul-keating-aukus-australia-us-alliance/">Paul Keating</a>—argue that Australia should pursue a foreign policy that is “more independent” from the United States.
But the Australian state jumps at the opportunity to stir imperialist tensions more often than not. This can be seen in it joining or supporting every US war since World War Two with little to no prompting.
The Australian political establishment backs the US not because it is too weak to resist US bullying but because the alliance enhances the power of the Australian ruling class and increases its capacity to dominate the Pacific region.
Australia is an imperialist power in its own right, with the thirteenth-largest economy in the world and the strongest military in South-East Asia. However, as a middle-ranking power, it has always relied on a “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6557">great and powerful friend</a>” to help safeguard its regional interests, first through an alliance with Britain and since the Second World War with the United States.
Chief among those interests is the security of the sea approaches to the island continent: Australian capitalism is dependent on international shipping to buy and sell commodities in Asian markets, to import oil from the Middle East and to access deliveries of weapons, machinery and equipment from the United States. Only the US Navy can control the wide arc of maritime territory from the Indian Ocean off north-western Australia to the South Pacific. 
In addition, Australian capitalists have long regarded the country’s neighbours—in particular Papua New Guinea, East Timor and the Pacific island states—as Australia’s “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7150">backyard</a>”, with Australian companies dominating their economies.
Australia also lacks the industrial base to field a modern military without the support of a larger ally. Without the backing of the US, Australia would need to triple or quadruple its military spending. Instead, through AUKUS and the US alliance, the Australian capitalist class can piggyback on the US military. And this allows Australia to access the latest US military technology—not just nuclear submarines, but advanced jet aircraft, missiles, naval combat systems and more. 
This is why the US alliance remains an article of faith for both ALP and Liberal governments. Any party that is serious about governing Australian capitalism must sign up to the alliance—the alternative is to face destabilisation by the capitalists and the military top brass.
Australia’s dependence on its “great and powerful friend” means that the ruling class goes out of its way to keep its “friend” firmly anchored in the Indo-Pacific. This helps thwart the emergence of a rival imperial power or nationalist forces that might obstruct the country’s sea lanes or disrupt its investments. One example is the Menzies government aggressively lobbying the Johnson administration in 1964 to commit more US troops to the Vietnam War. 
The AUKUS agreement fits within this general orientation: it is an aggressive alliance designed to maintain US imperialist domination of the Indo-Pacific region. But it also strengthens the power of the Australian state as a junior partner of US imperialism. Rory Medcalf, the head of ANU’s National Security College and a leading China hawk, has <a href="https://nsc.anu.edu.au/content-centre/article/opinion/australian-way-war-and-peace">hailed</a>
AUKUS as Australian imperialism’s “coming of age as a truly Indo-Pacific power”.
The price paid for US military protection is that Australia contributes to almost all US wars and occupations. From Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s to staking itself as China’s most aggressive antagonist in the region today, the Australian government embraces these opportunities to remind the US of Australia’s value to its broader imperial project. 
China is indeed challenging US domination of Asia and hence Australia’s own imperialist project, which is closely identified with the US. China’s growing ambitions threaten Australia’s informal empire in PNG, East Timor and the Pacific island states, as well as its trade routes and, potentially, its influence in Indonesia, a critical power to Australia’s north.
China’s state capitalist model of economic development is also viewed as a threat to the US-dominated liberal economic order that Australian capitalists have greatly benefited from.
Trump’s first administration was an <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-trump-presidency-us-imperialism-and-the-future-of-the-neoliberal-order/">aggressive</a>
response to the rise of China (although he only generalised what Barack Obama before him acknowledged with his “<a href="https://isreview.org/issue/88/us-imperialisms-pivot-asia/index.html">pivot to Asia</a>”). His program to “Make America Great Again” used tariffs and increased military spending to increase US military-industrial might. Nonetheless, by alienating US allies and destabilising American politics, the Trump administration created opportunities for China to expand its influence, thereby undermining America’s ability to contain its new imperialist rival. 
Rather than mark a break with Trump, the <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/bidens-plan-for-the-us-empire/">Biden administration</a> continued and intensified the China pivot, continuing the focus on rebuilding domestic manufacturing capability and infrastructure alongside an <a href="https://pacforum.org/publications/pacnet-85-countering-complaints-about-bidens-china-strategy-lessons-from-the-us-asia-first-policy/">escalation</a>
of military pressure in the South China Sea and Taiwan. 
Where Biden did depart from Trump was in his multilateral approach to building <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/has-biden-checkmated-china">alliances</a>
and his ability to sell war as peace. Indeed, Biden and Albanese (the so-called “progressive” wing of the establishment) have overseen the biggest destabilisation of the Indo-Pacific region and acceleration toward war with China of any recent governments: they have carried out Trump’s program with gusto.
Trump has made it clear that his main priority during his second presidency will be great power <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/has-biden-checkmated-china">confrontation</a>
with China. This includes a proposed 60 percent tariff on imports from China and a promise to raise the military budget from 3 percent to 5 percent of GDP (US$1.5 trillion) annually. His appointment of aggressive <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-nsc-china-hawks">China hawks</a>
to key positions in his new administration fits with this general strategy. <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3286448/what-does-trumps-pick-pentagon-chief-mean-us-china-military-ties">Peter Hegseth</a>, the proposed defence secretary responsible for the Pentagon, recently bemoaned: “China has a full spectrum long-term view of not just regional but global domination and we have our heads up our arses”.
Contrary to what much of the liberal commentariat says about him, Trump is not an isolationist, nor does he propose a withdrawal of US global power. Trump is an economic nationalist who sets out to make deals with both friends and foes alike; unlike liberals such as Biden, he does not hide the fact that it must be to the advantage of the United States and its corporations. It is this transactional nationalism that leads Trump to downgrade participation in geopolitical alliances or withdraw from them completely. In place of alliances and multilateral pacts, Trump prefers bilateral deals with US allies. 
While Trump’s strategy is to restore US imperial dominance, it will most likely, just as it did in his first term, accelerate its relative decline. This means other imperial powers as well as regional ones becoming more assertive, which will intensify conflicts between states over a failing capitalist system.
What this means for AUKUS and the US alliance is unclear. Trump’s demand that US allies “pay their own way” already fits with a general consensus among Australian ruling circles that they must do more to <a href="https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/australias-defence-strategic-review-forging-partnerships-and-self-reliance/">increase</a>
their self-reliance as part of the US alliance. The AUKUS pact is a prime example of a junior partner that “pays its own way”.
What is clear is that the Australian political establishment is frantically preparing to use the second Trump presidency to further enhance the power of Australian imperialism. Their main orientation so far has been to accept Trump’s argument that US allies must do more to foot their own defence bills. For example, John Blaxland, former head of ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies, recently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/the-prospect-of-australias-defence-being-dependent-on-the-whim-of-donald-trump-points-to-a-need-to-muscle-up-on-our-own">argued</a>:
“The prospect of Australia’s defence being dependent on a presidential whim points to the need for Australia to muscle up on its own, including with as much US-sourced technology as can be accessed, without waiting for another white knight or great white fleet to come to the rescue.” 
In other words, Canberra must prepare to further increase military spending (probably funded by cuts to working-class living standards) and pick up the slack among US allies in preparation for the diplomatic dysfunction that is likely to emanate from Washington under a second Trump presidency.
For the Australian ruling class, the lie that the US alliance is about protecting the Australian population helps legitimise increased military spending and the drive to war. AUKUS and the US alliance have been much easier to sell to (and hide from) the Australian public with Biden and not Trump leading in Washington. Under Trump, larger numbers of people might see the alliance for what it really is: boosting Australian imperial power to protect US domination of the region.

Trump, AUKUS and the US alliance

Trump’s victory has sent shock waves through global politics. His far-right government-in-waiting has promised to deport millions of immigrants, block action on climate change, slash and burn social services, further empower the police and more. His administration will be chock filled with billionaires and bigots, and their mission will be to recast the machinery of the US state in their image.
Trump’s foreign policy agenda is less clear. He is without question a champion of US power on the world stage. But he also presents himself as an outsider and a free agent. He likes to dress up his admiration of and dealings with various dictators as an example of peaceful coexistence. He also used his opposition to the Iraq war to attack Hillary Clinton and the Washington establishment back in his first successful presidential run in 2016. 
Trump tried to play the same game with Israel’s war on Gaza. Though a long-time supporter of Israel, he insisted that the current slaughter would never have happened with him in charge. He appealed to those who were rightly furious with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel’s genocide and declared himself a peacemaker. “The Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan and across the country want a stop to the endless wars and a return to peace in the Middle East”, Trump said in a stump speech aimed at Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan. He also repeatedly attacked Harris for her association with the Cheney family, who were central to the so-called “war on terror” that devastated Iraq and Afghanistan for decades. 
This rhetoric resonated with sections of the Arab and Muslim political class. After being invited to join the stage at a Trump campaign event in Michigan, Imam Belal Alzuhairi of the Islamic Center of Detroit explained his support for Trump in simple if deluded terms: “We as Muslims stand with President Trump because he promises peace”. The Yemeni mayor of Hamtramck, the first city in the US to elect an all-Muslim city council and a Muslim mayor, also endorsed Trump. (Others in the Arab and Muslim community, as well as the Palestine Solidarity movement, chose instead to campaign for a boycott or for the Greens’ candidate Jill Stein.)
It is too early to know whether Trump was successful in relating to the small minority of voters motivated by Gaza. On the one hand, the Council on American-Islamic Relations released a set of exit polls that indicated Muslims saw through his cynical appeals. According to <a href="https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-exit-poll-of-muslim-voters-reveals-surge-in-support-for-jill-stein-and-donald-trump-steep-decline-for-harris/">this survey</a>, 21 percent of Muslims voted for Trump versus 20 percent for Harris, down from 69 percent who backed Biden in 2020. If their polling is accurate then the story isn’t the small shift of Muslim voters to Trump, but a collapse in their loyalty to the Democratic Party and a concomitant surge in support for Stein, who according to this poll won a staggering 59 percent of Muslim voters. 
Unfortunately, these positive findings are contradicted by other data points. The Associated Press’ VoteCast exit poll found that 63 percent of Muslims voted for Harris, essentially a status quo outcome. Yet the Arab American Institute conducted pre-polling that showed a split of 41 to 40 for Trump and Harris among Arab Americans, a significant shift given that they have typically backed Democratic presidential nominees by substantial margins. The election results from Dearborn, Michigan, the largest majority Arab American city in the US, signalled an even more dramatic shift. There, Trump won 42 percent of the vote compared to 36 for Harris and 18 for Stein, a radical shift from Biden’s 74 to 24 smashing victory over Trump in 2020.
We may never find out just how many Palestine supporters bought Trump’s absurd claim to be a peace candidate, how many voted for him simply to punish the Democrats for their stance on Gaza and how many backed him for other reasons. The issues aren’t easy to disentangle. 
But regardless, the truth is that Trump is just as committed to US imperialism and to Israel as his Democratic predecessors. This has become increasingly clear as he has begun constructing his administration, a who’s who of war hawks, Zionists and far-right freaks. Trump’s Middle East team is arguably even more extreme in its support for Israeli aggression against the people of Palestine, Lebanon and beyond. 
The headline pick is Mike Huckabee as the nominee for US ambassador to Israel. This is a guy who once declared that “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”, before conceding a few years later that if these non-existent people insisted on having a country, then it should be constructed on existing Arab territory. He opposes any Palestinian control over land in historic Palestine.
Trump’s proposed defense secretary is Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host and a current white nationalist. He has built his career by defending US soldiers accused of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth has also advocated the construction of a Jewish temple on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque—a position so extreme that even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not support it.
His pick for United Nations ambassador is MAGA hatchet woman Elise Stefanik, who has championed the repression against Palestine solidarity activists across America. Like most supporters of Israel, Stefanik relies heavily on the spurious claim that opposing Israel’s crimes is inherently antisemitic, accusing both student protesters and their targets in university management of this crime. In a recent speech to the pro-Israeli think tank Endowment for Middle East Truth, she declared her task would be to represent Israel’s interests in the “den of antisemitism” that is the UN.
In many cases, these despicable figures will simply be continuing the genocidal policies already established by the Biden administration. For instance, Stefanik’s Democratic predecessor Linda Thomas-Greenfield vetoed four separate motions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. And while Trump has criticised Biden for not supplying the Israelis with sufficient weaponry, this is purely for show. A <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2023/2024/Costs%20of%20War_US%20Support%20Since%20Oct%207%20FINAL%20v2.pdf">paper</a>
by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that the Israeli war effort has benefited from an unprecedented $22 billion in US aid and related military expenditure in the last fourteen months, supplemented by an additional 100 arms deals too small to require congressional reporting. Through these measures, the Democrats have granted a state carrying out a well-documented genocide the largest military aid package since World War Two.
But this is no reason to shrug our shoulders at the prospect of Trump. The presence of far-right and ultra-Zionist figures in the Trump administration could lead to dramatic new developments and allow Israel even more scope for aggression. During his last administration, Trump led a number of countries in recognising all of Jerusalem as Israeli territory and moved the US embassy to that city for the first time. Like many of Trump’s worst decisions, the construction of a new US embassy on stolen Palestinian land in Jerusalem was upheld by the Biden administration. 
Trump secured peace deals between Israel and a range of regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. While this was a primarily symbolic move by states that in practice had never seriously sought to confront Israel, these deals, grouped under the umbrella of the Abraham Accords, were a substantial diplomatic victory for the Israelis. Trump and his allies now have their sights set on convincing the Saudis to sign on, a move which would largely complete the political isolation of the Palestinian people, further insulating Israel from anything approaching regional opposition.
While nobody who backs Palestine should mourn the defeat of Harris and the Democrats, we cannot be complacent about the incoming Trump administration. Trump and his monstrous cabinet are primed to enable the Israeli far right’s most violent and expansionist policies. We cannot yet know what horrors they will unleash on the people of Palestine, but we know from the past year that the Democratic Party will be no opposition. It will be up to us. 
As well, there will be opportunities to build new alliances with other groups targeted by Trump’s reactionary agenda and relate to the general instability his leadership will generate. Activists and organisers need to be ready to respond and use the widespread revulsion at the monsters taking over the White House to strengthen the movement for justice, peace and liberation in Palestine.

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