Continued from Part I: The sound of bootheels
Feb. 2022 rally in support of Ukraine in Times Square. Photo: Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0
Trump’s tariff war dramatically illustrates the breakdown of the free-trade globalization of the post-Cold War era. While trade wars had in fact begun before he took office, this escalation marks a qualitative change in international relations, a new level of nationalism and shifting or simply trashing alliances. And history has shown that trade wars can be the prelude to shooting wars.
At the same time, Trumpism’s attacks on Ukraine and the European Union reflect his aim, as we wrote recently, “to remake the world under the domination of new forms of fascism—over the ashes of Ukraine, Palestine, and Greenland if need be.” If that means abandoning NATO, then so be it. The White House ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by Trump and his Vice President J.D. Vance made clear their desire to let Russian President Vladimir Putin have his genocidal way with Ukraine. That is the true content of the theatrical show of “peace” negotiations, with a side quest to divvy up Ukraine’s mineral resources with Russia.
What kind of new world order Trump is heading for, despite whatever his aims are, is complicated by the chaotic, impulsive nature of his actions, as well as ignorance, tunnel vision, stupidity, and surrounding himself with incompetents. Chaos is at least in part deliberate. More important than Trump’s transactional tendencies is the drive to create a neofascist world order. Putin, of course, agrees completely. He and his acolytes, including some of the Western Left, hide its imperialist nature under the term “multipolar,” which means multiple great powers carving up the world into “spheres of influence.” That is not new. The two world wars were the supreme manifestations of multipolar capitalism.
“Might makes right” is surely the grand principle of Trump’s world order. That too is not new but is now less hidden. Liberals want to defend what they call the “rules-based order” and “shared principles” or “values.” That is a cherished illusion that has some basis in fact, but the U.S. always reserved the right to make exceptions to those rules and values. Which values were put into practice with the multiple reactionary coups that the U.S. has been involved in, from Hawaii 1893 to Honduras 2009? One pundit declared that Russia’s conquest of Crimea announced the end of the principle underlying the UN that territory was not to be annexed by force, disregarding especially Israel’s de facto annexation of Palestine and the Golan Heights beginning in 1967.
The post-Cold War period, which was immediately declared “the end of history” and Bush and Clinton promised us a “peace dividend,” was punctuated with genocides, beginning with Bosnia and Rwanda, on through the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, which has been reignited in the past two years, and the genocidal counterrevolution in Syria up until the Assad regime’s dramatic fall this year. Of course, the Cold War was also a time of genocides, on which no one had a monopoly.
But it is important to see not only the continuity but the discontinuity. Geopolitical relations now openly center on the direct use of force and territorial conquest and the division of the world into zones of domination by “multipolar” imperialist powers. Trump’s threats to annex Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Gaza are aligned with Russia’s takeover of parts of Georgia, its threats to Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and above all its genocidal invasion trying to annex Ukraine.
GAZA AS TOUCHSTONE OF WAR
A free-Palestine protest in Toronto, Canada, in November 2023. Photo: Can Pac Swire, CC BY-SA 2.0
Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza reveals the future this “new world order” is heading for if left unchecked. Israel ended its brief ceasefire in Gaza—which it had never fully observed—not with words but with the slaughter of over 400 Palestinians on March 18, including 150 children. Since that time, it has returned to piling atrocity upon atrocity, as it had done before the ceasefire.
The world was shocked by the army’s execution of 15 paramedics and rescue workers in clearly marked rescue vehicles, which were crushed and dumped in a mass grave together with the human beings, some with their arms or legs bound. This is one of many credible reports of executions of aid workers, journalists, doctors—even children. Forty-four Gaza doctors reported repeatedly observing children shot in the head or chest, killed in a manner that they believe indicates deliberate targeting.
Even more deadly but less reported is the gradual killing of Gazans by starvation and disease. From the beginning in 2023, Israeli political and military leaders announced their intention to turn Gaza into “a place where no human being can exist.” They have largely accomplished that, systematically destroying the medical system, agriculture, power and water supplies, and razing a huge portion of the territory. Even before shooting down the ceasefire, Israel had already blocked all aid deliveries. On April 16, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz reiterated: “Israel’s policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza.”
The West Bank has also been targeted for killings, expulsions, and repression over this whole period. This is a deliberate policy. Deputy Parliament Speaker Nissim Vaturi recently declared: “We need to separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza. We are being too considerate. We will soon turn Jenin [in the West Bank] into Gaza.”
Trump has fully, openly backed the genocide in Palestine, after a Biden administration that sent Israel almost all the weapons it wanted, while occasionally distancing itself rhetorically. President Joe Biden’s aid to the genocide and Kamala Harris’s refusal to break from that policy constituted one factor in her defeat in the election. The winner, Trump, greatly intensified the repression of anti-genocide speech and protest in the U.S., and he quickly lifted the sanctions Biden placed on a few fascist Israeli settler leaders in the West Bank. Still, the solidarity movement is strong and active.
Far from an exception, Israel’s genocide is a harbinger of where the world is headed, unless powerful movements halt the slide toward fascism and war. Israel has already expanded its occupation in Syria and attacks on Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran.
And it is in this period that the Trump regime has heated up the nuclear arms race. He lectured Zelensky, “You’re gambling with World War III,” but U.S. allies, “from Germany to South Korea, Japan to Saudi Arabia [are among countries that] are now openly talking about embracing the bomb—and just as worrisome, actually deploying nukes if hostilities break out.”
CONGO AS TOUCHSTONE OF IMPERIALISM
The situation in Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in particular, shows how imperialism is as central to the Trumpian world order as it was to the neoliberal period that preceded it, as well as to the Cold War period, and in fact the whole of the past five centuries. Africa has been a battlefield of revolution and counterrevolution, of liberation and neocolonialism.
M23 militants patrol Congo streets. Photo: FMT, CC BY 4.0
The DRC today faces a major humanitarian crisis. Fighting by armed groups in eastern DRC, most prominently the Rwanda-backed M23, killed 7,000 people just in January and February 2025. Six million have been killed in the wars in DRC over the last three decades. The fighting has been marked by targeting civilians, summary executions of adults and children, and extreme, often deadly, sexual violence. The M23 occupies a large part of eastern DRC. When they took over Goma, one of DRC’s biggest cities, earlier this year, hundreds of women prisoners were raped and burned alive.
Over 7 million people have been displaced internally, and another 1 million have fled the country. Healthcare facilities, schools, and other infrastructure were destroyed. Across the country, 27 million people rely on humanitarian aid.
Even outside the conflict zone, the medical system is weak and outbreaks of Ebola, measles, and COVID-19 have taken a toll. Hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of children, work in mines in conditions that have been compared to slave labor.
Powerful countries like the U.S., China, and EU members do little to improve the situation. But it is not just that they sit by and let it happen. They are in fact deeply involved in the ravaging of Congo and are profiting from it. And the U.S. and Europe were instrumental in bringing the Congo to this condition.
Like much of Africa, the DRC was deeply scarred by the transatlantic slave trade. Then the Belgian king colonized it, imposing slave labor in rubber extraction, razing villages that resisted, piling up hands severed from the human beings who resisted or failed to meet production quotas. Violence, famine, and disease contributed to a fall of the population by half or more in 23 years, according to some estimates.
Then when the DRC achieved independence from Belgium in 1960, the new president, Patrice Lumumba, declared that its vast mineral resources would be used for the benefit of the people. Belgium, likely with CIA support, made sure that Lumumba was deposed.[1] Within months, he was murdered, and the new regime was integrated into the U.S.-dominated Western capitalist economy as a supplier of minerals with little benefit to the population.
That set the stage for today, when the armed groups are sustained by mining revenues. The DRC produces over half the world’s cobalt and holds 60-80% of the world’s coltan. Both are minerals vital to high tech manufacturing, from smartphones to electric cars to advanced weapons. The M23 rebel group makes $800,000 a month from coltan production, much of which is smuggled through Rwanda to evade sanctions.
The economic superpowers knowingly buy up the minerals from Rwanda to power their industries. The EU has so far rejected calls from within Europe to suspend its minerals trade agreement with Rwanda, still pretending that Rwanda is the source. Trump, for his part, cut off U.S. aid to DRC and is considering putting sanctions on Rwandan officials and giving the DRC military assistance against M23 in exchange for a minerals deal he is trying to cut. Currently, China dominates Congo’s mining sector as well as the refined cobalt market. All these powers extract wealth from the country while fueling the system of slave labor and violent conflict.
That is to say, the devastation of Congo is not, as the media tend to present it if they even bother to mention one of the largest countries in Africa, the result of a people’s mysterious refusal to “develop” or inherent tendency to corruption. It is the position into which the country was forced by capitalist imperialism, from which the people tried to liberate themselves in their revolution of independence, and which the colonial powers forced them back into with a violent counterrevolution. No new multipolar capitalist world order offers anything different.
Continues with Part III: Trumpism and the present moment of capitalism
[1] See Philosophy and Revolution by Raya Dunayevskaya (Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 217-18; editorial in the February 1961 News & Letters; and “The American Katanga Lobby and the Congo Crisis,” Jan. 2, 1962, Weekly Political Letter, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, #3002-3006.