President Donald Trump’s Group of 7 blunder in Quebec illustrates the disarray and decay plaguing U.S. imperialism. By refusing to sign the summit’s closing communiqué, and then blasting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “weak” and “dishonest” three days before he embraced North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump further alienated the closest U.S. allies. The week before, he’d assaulted the European Union, Canada, and Mexico with tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
According to the New York Times, the mouthpiece for the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, Trump “all but blew up the Group of 7 nations that the United States has led for more than four decades and essentially declared open political war on America’s closest neighbor” (6/10).
Pre-Trump, the U.S. and its most important allies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Japan) would collaborate on how to check their common imperialist foes, China and Russia. Trump has torpedoed this tradition and with it the “rules-based international order,” aka the “liberal world order”—the capitalist bosses’ code for the structure for U.S. imperialist dominance post-World War II. Tellingly, Trump asked for Russia to be let back in the G7, four years after they were kicked out for annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine.
“America First”: a losing proposition
For the dominant finance capital wing, the likes of JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil, Trump’s undisciplined opportunism threatens their position atop the imperialist pecking order. Trump’s foreign policy and trade decisions are under attack by both Republican and Democratic politicians, the stooges who serve these bosses’ agenda. Pulling out of the Paris Climate accord, scuttling the Iran nuclear deal, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, instigating a tariff war--each provocation, they complain, leaves the U.S. more isolated and less able to project its power. Meanwhile, U.S. bosses worry that Trump’s moves toward open racism and fascism will rip the mask of “democracy” from the murderous profit system—and undermine the bosses’ efforts to reinvigorate U.S. patriotism and enlist U.S. workers in the next global war.
Meanwhile, unhappy U.S. allies are left trying to prop up what’s left of the liberal world order, hoping for “a president who shares their values” after the 2020 elections (The Atlantic, 6/10). Or as Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main wing’s leading think tank, put it: “The United States has knocked itself off the pedestal” (Economist, 6/7).
Trump’s reckoning
In recent months, Trump has more openly defied the biggest bosses’ attempts to constrain him. He ousted former ExxonMobil CEO and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Hoover Institute member and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, both reliable main-wing operatives. In their place, Trump appointed Mike Pompeo, once the favorite congressman of the Koch Brothers, and John Bolton, the loose cannon who has made a career out of sabotaging multilateral agreements like the Iran nuclear deal.
The U.S. domestic-oriented wing (led by the Kochs, the Mercers, and Sheldon Adelson, among others) has no interest in investing in the massive military ground forces required to maintain a U.S.-dominated world order. As a result, they place less value on the international alliances that Trump is subverting.
But the main-wing bosses aren’t taking this lying down. The escalating Mueller investigation represents their effort to bring Trump to heel. In May 2016, Trump’s foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos told the Australian ambassador to Britain, Alexander Downer, that Russia had “derogatory information” about Hillary Clinton (Observer, 6/5). Papadopoulos turned out to be one of many incompetents in Trump’s camp who have opened the president to scrutiny, giving Mueller’s team an opening. Whether this opening leads to anything in the near future will hinge in part on whether the main-wing bosses are willing to risk a civil war with the president’s racist base.
Sooner or later, though, the main wing will seek to smash the domestic wing., Before they can impose fascism and a global war effort upon the working class, the main-wing bosses will need much greater discipline in their own ranks.
High stakes for all
The stakes for the U.S. ruling class are high. Their position as the world’s dominant imperialist is challenged more each day. In Africa, Chinese investment has exceeded the U.S. since 2009 (FT, 6/13/17). In South America, China is already the largest trading partner with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru (Atlantic, 2/3). The Chinese military buildup in the South China Sea continues unabated. Meanwhile, the ongoing nightmare for workers in Syria illustrates how Russia is outmaneuvering the U.S. in the Middle East.
As Foreign Affairs (4/30) noted:
The era of Pax Americana is over, but the next chapter of America’s role in the world is still being written. We are headed toward a new world order, and the United States should take a leadership role in shaping what that order will be. If it doesn’t, the outcome will be decided without it, its interests, and its values.
The stakes for the international working class are equally high. Whatever the outcome of this investigation, impeachment or the next election will hurt the working class. U.S. rulers will have conflicts internal and external, but they will always be in agreement about exploiting the working class and using their bodies to fight the next oil war. Working-class brothers and sisters must continue to look under the mask of capitalist “democracy.”
The deadliest mistake we can make would be to take sides in a fight among capitalist bosses. Robert Mueller and the FBI are the bosses’ professional contract killers, among the most lethal and racist enemies of the working class. Cheering for the impeachment of Trump equates to siding with a segment of the ruling class that is even more ready, willing, and able to unleash war and fascism on the world. We are told that Trump is destroying “democracy.” But for workers, capitalist electoral democracy has always been a dangerous myth, a cloak thrown over the capitalists’ brutal class dictatorship. It’s not just Trump, it’s capitalism! No president can ever serve workers’ interests. Only a communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party, can create the world we need.