War, rearmament and militarism are on the rise globally. Young people and workers opposed to the imperialist slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine and the threat of war in Asia are looking for a way forward.
In recent weeks, Trump has been gaining in the polls in Michigan and other swing states on the issue of war. He leads by a wide margin on who is better suited to handle the Middle Eastern and Ukrainian wars. In particular, a large number of Muslim-Americans, disgusted by the Democrats’ unrestricted support for the Israeli regime’s genocidal war, are looking to Trump as an alternative.
This is understandable given how shamefully the Democrats have failed Muslim-Americans and the anti-war movement. While claiming to support a ceasefire, Biden and Harris have stood by Israeli imperialism as it carries out escalation after bloody escalation in its genocidal war of expulsion in Gaza. By stationing 100 troops armed with a deadly missile-defense system in Israel, the Democratic party has brought the US to the brink of war with Iran.
Hundreds of thousands of Muslim-Americans, young people and anti-war activists who might have once supported the Democrats now find it impossible to back this party of war and imperialism. This raises the question: is Trump a better option?
In reality, Trump is as much of a warmonger as any Democrat. He represents a wing of the ruling class that sees the long-term conflict with China as the priority over the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. There’s only so many F-16s to go around. US military analysts admit that it is too “overstretched and undersupplied” to arm Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan at the same time.
It is extremely unfortunate that Trump is being allowed to pose as the anti-war candidate in this election. Trump, like the European far-right, is able to masquerade as anti-war only because of the sweeping failures of the left. Formerly progressive figures like AOC and Jamaal Bowman have bent the knee to the warmongering Democratic agenda, leaving a massive vacuum for right-populist ideas.
Casting a protest vote for Jill Stein, the strongest genuine anti-war candidate in this election, is a first step in the fight against the imperialist policies of Trump and Harris. Breaking with the Democrats and Republicans today is necessary in order to build an anti-war movement with teeth. The fact is that unless we fight back, imperialist war will continue under the stewardship of both capitalist parties.
Trump’s Real Record On War
Trump has vowed to end the Ukraine war and has called on the Biden administration to deny the Ukrainian military access to long-range missiles capable of striking deep into Russia. This would be a steep escalation, and Putin has claimed that this move would be tantamount to NATO declaring war on Russia.
But Trump’s opposition to this is pure posturing. It is not based on a goal of averting nuclear war, as he frequently claims in his speeches. It’s based on the idea that a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine is the wrong war for US imperialism.
Trump and his far-right allies see the broader conflict with Chinese imperialism as the primary one to prepare for and are willing to sacrifice “pawns” like Ukraine in service of that agenda. Increasingly, the logic of capitalist expansion is pushing the US and China-led imperialist blocs along the path to armed confrontation.
To this end, Trump and Biden have escalated conflict with China on a number of fronts—technology, trade, rearmament—with the aim of positioning US imperialism favorably for a war with Chinese imperialism.
The Trump administration supplied over $18 billion of weapons to Taiwan over four years – the most of any presidency. This included $8 billion of F-16 jets and long-range missile technology capable of hitting targets anywhere in China. In an op-ed, JD Vance explicitly argued that it is necessary to end the Ukraine war so that the most advanced weaponry can be sent to Taiwan.
Despite all that, Trump has given the signal to fund the Ukraine war when the ruling class has demanded it. In April, Republicans approved a Democrat-led $95 billion package of military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan (of which $61 billion was earmarked exclusively for Ukraine) only because Trump gave the go-ahead.
But even if Trump were to win, it’s unlikely that he could put an end to all military support to Ukraine or even fundamentally alter the position of US imperialism in the war. As we’ve pointed out, the stakes are too high for Western imperialism to simply abandon the Ukrainian regime. Ukraine is meant to become a human fortress for NATO against Russian imperialism – a defeat would be too much for the imperialists to stomach.
On the expanding war in the Middle East, Trump has no substantial disagreements with Biden or Harris. He virulently supports Netanyahu’s wars of aggression and has threatened that Iran would be “blown to smithereens” under his administration.
While in office, Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem as an endorsement of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a sharp provocation against the Palestinian people which Biden has refused to undo. Trump’s Republicans have pushed for more weapons to Israel.
He is also in favor of attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, saying that he would “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.” Needless to say, an attack on a nuclear facility has the potential to spark a Chernobyl-scale catastrophe, not to mention the armed response it would provoke.
Trump is no dove. In just the first few weeks of his presidency, Trump tripled the pace of Obama’s drone strikes across the Middle East, Pakistan and Somalia to nearly a strike a day. These attacks killed tens of thousands of regular people and set the pace for the rest of his presidency. A second Trump term would be no different, but would take place in a changed world with US and Chinese imperialism gearing up for direct conflict.
No Such Thing As An Anti-War Capitalist
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and capitalism was restored in Russia and Eastern Europe, bourgeois thinkers called it the “end of history.” They thought that by the triumph of their system against Stalinism, there would no longer be any need for conflict.
By their logic, with the world united by capitalism and US imperialism as the sole remaining world power, war itself would become obsolete. All disputes would be “peacefully” resolved by the workings of the free market. How wrong they were.
In fact, the collapse of any alternative to imperialism gave the US capitalist class a freer hand to wage war to defend their interests. The US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s were carried out with the support of capitalist classes worldwide, including the Russian ruling class.
The growth of Chinese imperialism, especially after the 2008 crash, means that for the first time since the collapse of Stalinism, US imperialism has a serious rival—except now, that rival doesn’t represent an alternative to capitalism in any sense, which Stalinism did in a distorted form. US and Chinese imperialism are now on a collision course as they compete to dominate the world’s resources, supply chains and markets.
When the whole pie is divided up (as the world is today among capitalist powers), the only way to increase your share is to fight for someone else’s. The logic of capitalism and its unending quest for greater and greater profits means that war is a necessary consequence of this system.
The link between capitalism and war goes deeper than any individual bourgeois politician or their personality. War is an intrinsic part of capitalism – as essential to it as the air we breathe is to us. Lenin described imperialist war as a band of thieves fighting among themselves for the right to loot and steal. There’s no more fitting metaphor.
Build A Mass Anti-War Party
No representative of this broken system can ever claim to be anti-war. In a field of imperialists and war-hawks, Jill Stein stands out as a clear anti-war candidate. If you’re like many millions of young people today and furious at the brutality of this system, we have no choice but to fight back. A vote for Stein should be part of that, along with strengthening the international anti-war movement with protests, school walkouts, and strikes.
After all, we’ve been here before. When working people tired of the warmongering of the Bush era, Obama campaigned as the anti-war candidate—as Trump is trying to pose today. Yet Obama escalated the war on Afghanistan and increased drone attacks in Pakistan, while pushing for war in Syria.
What prevented a direct assault on Syria by US imperialism was its failure to unify NATO on the question of war. Of course, that didn’t stop a blistering campaign of drone strikes over years that bombed the country into rubble.
We live in a different era today when Western imperialism is more consolidated and increasingly prepared to go to war. The working class is the only force capable of halting the drive to war and pushing back the racist and nationalist ideas that come with it. We urgently need to build an international anti-war movement that’s active in the unions, colleges and our communities.
History shows us that mass mobilization of working people and the threat of struggle are the only way to halt imperialist war. We need a new, anti-war party not only to vote down the calls for war in the halls of power, but to organize struggle in the streets and workplaces to shut down the entire capitalist system that makes war possible. We need to organize in international solidarity with working people around the world to rise up against bloodthirsty imperialist governments everywhere.
War is a symptom of capitalist decay, and this sick system will continue to conjure up new crises and conflicts until it destroys humanity. It will only be stopped with a socialist revolution. If you agree, join us in the fight!