David Finkel
Posted March 5, 2025
IMPERIALIST BACK-STABBING AND betrayal of smaller nations and peoples isn’t exactly something new. The Kurds, Palestinians, and in early generations the Poles and the people of what was Czechoslovakia, among many others, could tell you a lot about it.
Even so, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s ambush of Ukraine’s president Volodomyr Zelensky, and the rapid switch of U.S. support from Ukraine’s defense to Putin’s demand for an annexationist “peace” on Russian terms, shocked both U.S. and especially global public opinion.
Presented in the thin disguise of seeking peace with “realistic” concessions by Ukraine, the Trump plan’s real content was revealed in the March 3 announcement that all U.S. military aid had been “suspended.” That cutoff includes aid previously authorized, with funding legislated by Congress, and intelligence. According to the snarling Trump, it’s Putin who “wants peace,” while Zelensky doesn’t and “won’t be around very long.”
This points up one aspect of the Ukraine war. For those of us on the left who are consistent anti-imperialists, such as the Ukraine Solidarity Network (www.ukrainesolidaritynetwork.us), this war is first and foremost about Ukraine’s right to self-determination and national independence. But from the standpoint of U.S. imperialism, it’s always been a “proxy war” and a successful one at that, marketed as “democracies fighting against Russia with Ukrainian soldiers.”
That helps explain why the Biden administration, seeking to thread the geopolitical needle, gave Ukraine the military aid it needed to resist the invasion and damage Russia militarily but not to actually win the war, while Trump now finds it convenient to pull the plug for the sake of his own twisted ambitions and visions of U.S. world domination.
This despicable betrayal deserves all the condemnation, and more, that it’s receiving in both liberal and what remains of traditional-conservative opinion. But precisely because Trump, Vance and de-facto acting president Elon Musk are such vile and detestable creatures, it can be difficult to see some underlying dynamics that I’ll try to explorer here.
Among other atrocities, to name a few, the betrayal of Ukraine coincides with Musk’s chainsaw massacre of the federal work force, the gutting of agencies that administer social security and the weather service and public health and much more, the brutal shutdown of international aid programs, demands for university and college suppression of activism for Palestine, and flagrantly illegal detention of immigrants at Guantanamo for deportation.
All these are topped off with massive tariffs aimed at destroying the Canadian and Mexican economies, forcing those countries into subjugation, and threatening to bring about a North American-wide economic recession with serious global ramifications. The impact on U.S. workers, communities and consumers will begin to hit within a few short weeks.
It’s not all that hard to figure out the rationale behind the savage government cuts. They’re nothing to do with efficiency or saving money – quite the contrary, they will make government functioning less efficient, and probably lose money. The intention is both ideological, as Project 2025 makes clear, and greed-driven: the ultimate goal is to privatize essential services and programs, and essentially wipe out any that can’t be run profitably except for the military.
The more subtle question is what might be deeper purposes of Trump’s drunken-godzilla-like trampling on what used to be a more-or-less “stable” world system (for the Global North at least) . The system itself has tended toward dysfunction under the pressure of national rivalries, rising authoritarian tendencies, regional wars and devastating climate change, but that doesn’t entirely explain the impulse of the leading imperialist power to tear it apart all at once.
A Rational Kernel?
Is there some rational kernel wrapped deep within Trump’s rampages on the global and domestic stage? In some respects, there may be. Let’s take a quick look at what’s facing U.S. imperialism in a changing and rather unanchored world situation.
1) The looming ultimate confrontation is with China – not Russia, which is a menace to its neighbors and European politics, but not to vital U.S. interests. While neither the United States or China are anywhere near prepared militarily or economically – both rivals have severe internal weaknesses — that’s where their medium and longterm strategic planning needs to go.
For U.S. imperialism in particular, reliance on steel and aluminum imports in particular is a serious weakness. To the extent that “re-shoring” those industries strengthens ultimate war preparations, it’s a rational objective — even if targeting Canada on a large scale is, in the unusually colorful language of the Wall Street Journal editors, the “dumbest tariff plunge” ever.
In that regard, Trump’s schemes for looting the vital and rare-earth minerals of Ukraine, Greenland and Canada also falls into some logical pattern – that is to say, it’s not simply another ploy to enrich Trump’s corporate cronies, although that’s no small goal in its own right.
2) The catastrophes in the Middle East since October 7, 2023 have produced big victories for U.S. imperial interests. The victims of course are the Palestinian people undergoing the Israeli-U.S. Gaza genocide and West Bank ethnic cleansing, and Lebanese residents of villages and communities leveled by Israel’s carpet bombing. But in the cynical world of “geopolitics,” Russia is the big loser with the loss of its client Syrian regime and the strategic weakening of Iran and what was called “the axis of resistance” (even if its power was always overestimated).
The United States has now emerged with the potential to re-shape power relations in the Middle East. The very absurdity of Trump’s “Mar-A-Gaza” scheme, as idiotic as it appears on the surface, serves the purpose of pressuring the rulers of Arab states to come up with their own plan for reconstructing Gaza and financing that gargantuan project. (The just solution of massive U.S. reparations for Gaza is obviously not on the imperial agenda.)
For Trump to pull this off requires at least the appearance of a continuing Gaza ceasefire to facilitate the Israel-Saudi Arabia “normalization,” along with the projection of Israeli power to police the region.
For prime minister Netanyahu, however, keeping his governing coalition together requires preserving the option of renewing the full-scale assault on Gaza, however strategically futile that would be, and threatening to bomb Iran’s oil and nuclear facilities. Since that doesn’t tactically align with Trump’s agenda, his alternative would be to offer Netanyahu the United States’ support for Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank, sticking another knife in the Palestinian people’s back and opening up a whole new catastrophic scenario.
3) Russia’s three-year imperialist and annexationist invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic failure, not a victory. Despite the brutal impact on Ukraine and its people, Putin’s goals of erasing Ukraine’s independent existence and imposing a puppet regime are nowhere near achieved, and the massive military casualties Russia suffers are not sustainable much longer (even if Ukraine’s also may not be).
In that context, what conceivable sense can there be in Trump throwing Putin a lifeline and sabotaging Ukraine’s struggle for survival? And why is Israel reportedly lobbying the United States to urge Syria to let Russia keep its major naval and air bases in post-Assad Syria, which has caught the attention of a Ukrainian news organization?
On the face of it, Trump and the MAGA/alt-right part of his base actually favor Putin’s Russia and the same far-right parties in Europe that Putin supports and promotes. There is plenty of truth, and menace, in this, but there’s more to it beyond authoritarian ideological affinity.
In the strategic runup to confrontation with China, disrupting the Russia-China so-called “partnership without limits,” as Chinese president Xi put it, is a vital U.S. imperial goal. Imposing a rotten and false “peace” on Ukraine and Europe could solidify a new U.S.-Russia partnership, although whether it would survive the Trump presidential era is an open question.
Furthermore, it cannot have been purely coincidental that the first round of U.S.-Russia talks about Ukraine, without Ukraine, convened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia of all places. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that these also entailed curtain-raising negotiations for the grand settlement of the Middle East conflict, for which Trump may hope to get the Nobel Peace Prize. A Neville Chamberlain Peace-In-Our-Time Prize would be more in order.
Tentative Conclusions and Contradictions
Where this swirling chaos of craziness combined with imperial strategy might lead is not predictable, not only because the whole world order is shifting but also because it’s hard to separate the subjective factor of Trump’s temper tantrums, Musk’s goal of becoming the world’s first trillionaire, and general corporate greed from objective capitalist and imperialist interests. We can point to a contradiction that threatens the Trump/MAGA project.
Trump’s tactical success rests in part on launching simultaneous shock-and-awe assaults on the American people, the federal government, the social safety net, women, immigrants, Queer and trans people, the environment, Canada and Europe, foreign aid and everything else, in order to make focused responses impossible. This is abetted by the Democratic Party’s inability to offer working class people and communities any meaningful alternatives, and the absence of an influential radical left.
At the same time, the scale of the attacks compels people and movements in the United States, and traditional global partners, to look at the big picture beyond their own specific crises. As fired federal workers are starting to fight back and gain popular support, as children in Sudan and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh face starvation with USAID shut down, as Ukraine’s U.S.-supplied air defenses face cutoffs even as Israel receives more 2000-pound bombs, the interconnections become increasingly visible to more people.
As this is written on March 4, the impact of Trump’s tariffs and Canadian counter-measures are threatening wide sectors of the U.S. economy, raising inflationary pressures, and risking restrictions of critical Canadian-supplied energy supply to U.S. states, to say nothing of tanking the stock markets. This economic debacle may accelerate the timetable for a potential political explosion. What form that might take is as unpredictable as everything else.
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